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In his drive to create the world’s most efficient company, Jeff Bezos discovered what he thought was another inefficiency worth eliminating: hourly employees who spent years working for the same company.
Longtime employees expected to receive raises. They also became less enthusiastic about the work, Amazon’s data suggested. And they were a potential source of internal discontent.
Bezos came to believe that an entrenched blue-collar work force represented “a march to mediocrity,” as David Niekerk, a former Amazon executive who built the company’s warehouse human resources operations, told The Times, as part of an investigative project being published this morning. “What he would say is that our nature as humans is to expend as little energy as possible to get what we want or need.”
In response, Amazon encouraged employee turnover. After three years on the job, hourly workers no longer received automatic raises, and the company offered bonuses to people who quit. It also offered limited upward mobility for hourly workers, preferring to hire managers from the outside.
As is often the case with one of Amazon’s business strategies, it worked.
Turnover at Amazon is much higher than at many other companies — with an annual rate of roughly 150 percent for warehouse workers, The Times’s story discloses, which means that the number who leave the company over a full year is larger than the level of total warehouse employment. The churn is so high that it’s visible in the government’s statistics on turnover in the entire warehouse industry: When Amazon opens a new fulfillment center, local turnover often surges....
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Prime delivery has become a joke as I think @Mark alludes to. The movies alone are worth $120 a year (to me anyways), so I keep the membership. That, however, does not encumber me to purchase their products. Hell, I’ll gladly drive 15-20 miles to the nearest Walmart just to avoid having to buy from Amazon. I know some Wal Mart employees. Generally, they like working there.
BTW - Many will recall some years ago when Amazon allowed non-profits like MFO to receive a thin slice of the sale proceeds if purchased thru a link on that non-profit’s website. (And, MFO participated.) We all know how that went. Right? Basically, that’s what they do - use you until you no longer serve their interests. Corporate conscience? …
https://www.powells.com/
The baggage fees! When visiting Portland I've always left Powell's poorer than when I went in. Great store.
I harbor no ill-will against Bezos. Amazon today isn’t the customer-friendly firm he founded and nurtured for many years. I doubt he’s calling many of the shots today. Interestingly, their cloud computing business has grown larger than the retail side, including some lucrative government contracts.
Back to Bezos … on a (media) personal level I find him intelligent and engaging. Like Musk he’s a first-rate visionary. Remember how laughable it seemed when he went on 60 minutes a decade ago to announce they were looking at airborn drones for delivery some day? Today that’s nearing reality.
None of this excuses the abuses Amazon inflicts on its employees, other merchants or its customers. I’m pretty good at “compartmentalizing” most everything - including how I view people’s different qualities. So, I can usually see both sides of an individual. But, on the other hand, I’m sure many are hoping that that upcoming Blue Origin flight just keep going … and going … and going …
(Far out.)
ISTM ….. The entire trip is only about 15 minutes. Imagine the “buyer’s remorse” you’d feel the next morning having spent your whole wad on a 15 minute ride?
That safety net if measured by public social spending as a percentage of GDP is actually lower in Australia and Canada than in the US, though all are below the OECD average.
https://data.oecd.org/chart/6pfS
The chart below is a little old (it only goes up to 2012), but it highlights just how low Australia ranks historically. Again, social spending as pct of GDP.
A full picture involves much more than safety nets. The graph comes from this 2014 paper on Australia that provides both historical context and a much more expansive picture including minimum wages, social inclusion, and so on.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4246053/
Returning to the initial premise - that under capitalism companies must maximize profit to the exclusion of all else, thus leaving workers to fend for themselves. This characterizes the way companies operate in liberal market economies (LMEs). These include the US, UK, Canada and Australia.
Then there are coordinated market economies (CMEs) https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095637561
LMEs and CMEs are just different varieties of capitalism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Capitalism
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/hall/files/vofcintro.pdf
None of this is to say that Amazon couldn't do much better, but it does suggest that there are limits to what any company can do within the particular form of capitalism in operates. And there are no "pure" economies, just matters of degree and emphasis.
I do happen to know that when it comes to health care, Ireland's system provides diabetics anything and everything they need, for free to the individual. Of course, taxpayers ultimately "foot the bill." No surprise there. And I don't have the figure memorized, but there is an income limit in order to be eligible for the medical health care card. But even if someone is not eligible, I have to believe costs are much lower than they are in the States. That would make the social safety net more effective from the get-go.
https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2019/0415/1042763-how-irelands-spending-on-welfare-compares-to-the-rest-of-europe/
Just two words, and they aren't "Milton Friedman". Hobby Lobby. A company is free to act on its religious beliefs. Didn't you know that companies have beliefs? They're people too.
So if a company feels that paying workers a decent wage and treating them with dignity and respect is required by its religious beliefs, it's free to do so. Or if it wants to tithe 10% of its profits to the Church instead of giving the money to its shareholders, who's to say it can't?
I was gobsmacked in reading Australia given as an example of a "Democratic Socialist Capitalist" country. And again when it was implied that its safety net benefits were any more secure than those of the US.
For much of its history, Australia has been, shall we say, parsimonious. Some paragraphs rearranged for continuity.
http://library.bsl.org.au/jspui/bitstream/1/12232/1/Thornton_etal_Safety_net_to_poverty_trap_2020.pdf
Many economists subscribe to the theory of path dependence, aka "history matters". It's not sufficient to look at where things are, but how they got there, especially when it comes to stability of social nets. And the history of Australia is not a pretty one. I left out the reference to White Australia in the paper I was excerpting.
Here's a good paper about much of those last forty years. It compares and contrasts the US and Australia with respect to workfare. Very distinct histories, but with similar outcomes.
https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=3315&context=jssw
In addition to the Eurostat figures given in the article, you can use the link I gave above for OECD statistics. The numbers are similar.
https://data.oecd.org/chart/6pfS
The number for the means-testing threshold is important because that affects perception. If it is low, it stigmatizes people receiving the benefit. Perhaps you recall the brouhaha over "poor doors" - literally separate doors for residents of affordable housing units in condos.
OTOH, if the threshold is high, so perhaps 5-10% of people are excluded from the benefit or have to pay more, people tend to view that as merely requiring those who can afford it to pay their fair share. IRMAA is an example of that. Somewhere around 7% pay a higher Medicare premium based on income.
With respect to diabetes, that's handled with a long term illness (LTI) card separate from the medical health care card. There's no means testing for the LTI card. But there are additional conditions. Though you hold Irish citizenship, you would probably not qualify for the card. "To qualify, you must be 'ordinarily resident’ in the Republic of Ireland. This means that you are living here and intend to live here for at least one year. "
https://www2.hse.ie/services/long-term-illness-scheme/long-term-illness.html
Of course like most countries, medical coverage in Ireland is not truly universal. The first page that came up when I searched for "safety net Ireland" was this one: https://www.primarycaresafetynet.ie/
None of this is intended to disparage the safety net benefits that Ireland does provide. The article points out that absent some programs, the fraction of the population at risk of falling into poverty would jump from 15.7% to 43.8%. So the programs are clearly doing a lot of good.
But they could be better - they could be more universal; the amount spent on them could be brought more in line with the country's EU peers. Or even with the US.
But, sometimes you just have to take an institution for what it is, both good and bad. In my age cohort all young males were required to perform some degree of military service. The military was hardly known for it's gentle treatment of it's "employees" or it's generosity as an employer. On the other hand, it did serve for many as an introduction to the real world, where some sort of skill was needed to survive. While it did desire to retain a number of the better prospects on a permanent basis, there was certainly no pretense that it offered a working lifetime of job security.
While it's a bit of a comparative stretch, a very large business such as Amazon, which employs great numbers of employees possessing marginal business or technical skills, does invite some comparison to the military. It does serve to give young people entering the job market a good entry-level foothold into the world of commerce. It does require them to perform to a degree that they understand the realities of what it's going to take to survive in the real work-world. Once an employee has spent a year or so in the Amazon universe they are likely to be better prepared to leave and find a more promising work environment.
Amazon is what it is. It's no secret that it isn't the world's most generous or caring employer. To go to work there expecting a lifetime job sinecure is pretty unrealistic. Like the military, Amazon usually meets minimum standards for care of recruits, who after all did sign on voluntarily. Does Amazon hire warehouse workers with the promise of lifetime employment and advances in position? I really doubt that.
There has been an ongoing effort to unionize the Amazon workers, hopefully to give them more leverage in their efforts to improve their work environment. So far that hasn't proved viable, but the efforts to organize will continue, and hopefully will eventually prove successful.
In the meantime, like many other situations in the unfortunately real word, we simply see Amazon for what it is, and continue to apply whatever pressure we can to encourage it's improvement.
"
Actually, here's a better article: https://theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/12/military-versus-private-sector/422124/
But my impression has always been that the military is tough on new recruits during training but benefits-wise once you make it through that training period, it provides excellent ones for career military people--free housing, healthcare, tuition through ROTC. I think the comparison to Amazon thus isn't apt. The problem with serving in the military if you're a heterosexual white male is singular--the prospect of dying or being injured in a war. If you're female, not heterosexual or a person of color, you can encounter a host of other problems, although again I wonder for minority groups if the military isn't actually a less-racist institution than many private employers. Though I don't have the data, I've heard the military is actually more egalitarian regarding race than other professions.
It would seem to me that if Amazon were too far outside that norm then other employers would be cherry-picking Amazon employees right and left, and by offering significantly better work environments, forcing Amazon to improve their operation.
Enjoy your weekend, Derf