That NYT article about work practices at Amazon got so much attention that I’m sure the Washington Post will pick up the story too. Ha ha, just kidding.
Speaking of rich assholes, Vox has done a couple good Trump articles recently. Here’s one about how Trump is the kind of “moderate” that Ron Fournier should be masturbating about; it sounds like a Slatepitch, but consider this:
Trump opposes cuts to Social Security and Medicare, hasn’t signed Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge, believes single-payer health care works well in other countries, and is skeptical of free trade.
The immigration stuff is nuts but the last GOP presidential candidate — who was widely described as “moderate” — wanted people to self-deport, and that’s pretty nuts too.
Why won’t Fred Hiatt and Ron Fournier praise any of Trump’s moderation? They’d claim it’s the incivility but of course McCain could be pretty uncivil too, and they loved him. I think here’s the real reason, and it’s also part of the reason Trump is doing well in the primary (from another Vox article):
While most elite-funded and elite-supported Republicans want to increase immigration and decrease Social Security, a significant number of voters (across both parties) want precisely the opposite — to increase Social Security and decrease immigration.
Who do Ron Fournier and Fred Hiatt work for? A self-described “neocon guy” and the “centrist” sociopath who’s engineered a new form of white collar serfdom. Both are filthy rich, and both have views that are typical of the donor class.
Media elites pimp donor class-style “centrism” because they work for members of the donor class. The end.
Germy Shoemangler
Speaking of rich assholes…
From The Daily Mail:
Newport Crown Court heard how planners were horrified when they saw the ‘decorative stone plaques’ had been used as part of a gaudy £1m makeover to the Grade II-listed home, turning it into a ‘palace for an Iron Curtain dictator’. One of the 150-year-old gravestones was even engraved with the names of three brothers and a sister who all died while under the age of four.
JPL
Mike Luckovich, highlighted the amazon problem. link
JPL
@Germy Shoemangler: Just wow!
thefax
How many articles has slate.com run in the past few days that downplay the NYT amazon article? I forget, is Slate still owned by Washington Post?
boatboy_srq
Sounds like an excellent recipe for a permanently-stratified social structure. Millions pouring in to take cr#p jobs, millions more forced to stay in cr#p jobs to
avoidmitigate poverty, and a handful of Job Creators™ creating the new Scrooge & Marley to run everything and keep all those millionsstarvingemployed.Punchy
That article on Amazon is just mind-blowing. How the lowest-rated employees get bounced each year, setting up the strong incentive to narc, diss, and embarrass your fellow colleagues just to hurt their rating and thus save your own ass. I have to believe there’d be zero trust between employees and constant, pervasive tension among the non-managerial class.
Then again, the door is to the left and I’m not seeing any leg shackles and chains on their appendages.
eldorado
the real problem is at the low end. warehouse workers are contractors and they are absolutely abused
boatboy_srq
@Germy Shoemangler: @JPL: Your Job Creators™ at home. The “decorative stone plaques” touch is a perfect example of how heartless/clueless these volk are.
DougJ
@thefax:
Yes, but that company no longer owns the Washington Post newspaper. Bezos just bought the paper.
Belafon
As we’ve talked about here before, Amazon really isn’t doing anything that isn’t being done elsewhere to workers (not saying everything they do is good, but they’re not unique). A lot of the stuff they have been doing sounds just like the stuff small companies or tech companies do all the time.
BGinCHI
The American people care too much about the working conditions of their fellow citizens to continue buying cheap goods at Amazon.
MattF
There’s always been a puzzle– why does Republican base vote against its interests? Who would vote for a party of wannabe libertarians, Xtians and oligarchs? I mean, besides Fournier and Hiatt. The media on the right are trying to make a ‘Trump’s not a real Republican’ argument without realizing that’s the source of his popularity.
WereBear
Next thing you know, we’ll hear that at Amazon, bonuses are by Jelly of the Month Club.
Oatler.
@BGinCHI: That’s what drove Walmart into bankruptcy….
Betty Cracker
I think your analysis is exactly right.
@BGinCHI: Hahahaha!
BGinCHI
@BGinCHI: Wait. Never mind.
DougJ
@MattF:
Some of the real crazies, like Breitbart media and Coulter, are supporting him. It’s the more “respectable right” that hates him.
Belafon
@Punchy:
Microsoft did that, as did one of the companies I worked for. It didn’t work for either company, so I’m not sure why Amazon thinks it will work.
germy shoemangler
@JPL:
and this Onion headline:
Jeff Bezos Assures Amazon Employees That HR Working 100 Hours A Week To Address Their Complaints
JPL
@DougJ: Both Slate and Washington Post had articles on the work conditions at Amazon. I don’t have links but the articles mentioned how many employees the company hires compared to the 100 employees interviewed by the NYTimes. They also highlighted the guy who just loves his job, without mentioning that he came from a company where he was working 100 hours a week. Sure eighty hours sounds good after that.
JPL
@JPL: This is the Washington Post article.. link
OzarkHillbilly
@Germy Shoemangler:He’s not the only one to be that kind of an asshole:
A Missouri patio paved in military headstones? Veterans mad, VA investigating
DougJ
@JPL:
Basically an Amazon press release about how Bezos is a “relentless doer”.
OzarkHillbilly
@BGinCHI: 10,000 unemployed comedians and here you are giving it away for free.
phantomist
If Trump was really anti-immigrant he would impose a million dollar fine for every undocumented worker a company was found to employ. Why hasn’t he stated this common sense strategy for fixing the problem?
raven
@phantomist: hahahahahaha
dedc79
I wonder if anyone is bothering to ask Rubio about this, given how many times he name-dropped amazon at the Trumpbate.
OzarkHillbilly
@raven: Another stealing food from the mouths of starving comedians.
Gin & Tonic
@Belafon: Decades ago I was involved in a sort of “leadership training” thing, where the scoring system was always set up to assure that the top half of attendees passed, the bottom half failed. It worked about as you’d expect, but it took a shamefully long time for people to realize that and change the scoring metrics.
There is truly nothing new under the sun.
joes527
@MattF:
Steinbeck has your answer.
Just Some Fuckhead
Immigration cuts across both sides. On the left you have unionists/protectonists opposed to loose immigration allied with the nativists on the right. On the right you have Chamber of Commerce Republicans favoring looser immigration allied with open borders idiots on the right.
There are many more of the former than the latter. Getting control of our porous borders is an issue that isn’t going away.
Chris
@MattF:
“The salient fact of American politics is that there are fifty to seventy million voters each of who will volunteer to live, with his family, in a cardboard box under an overpass, and cook sparrows on an old curtain rod, if someone would only guarantee that the black, gay, Hispanic, liberal, whatever, in the next box over doesn’t even have a curtain rod, or a sparrow to put on it.”
Chris
@Just Some Fuckhead:
In an age of near-complete polarization, it’s interesting that this is one issue that actually does elicit different responses on both sides of the aisle.
boatboy_srq
@DougJ: Interesting side note: in my LinkedIn feed the other day was a Photoshop of Don Draper in a Mad Men still with the caption “You work 40 hours a week? I remember my first part-time job…” What the BLEEP is it with the USA that obscenely long hours are somehow a good idea? Weren’t we sold high-tech and automation and computers and all to make our jobs easier so we could have lives? Seems like the US has gone from working fewer hours than the French while being more productive than the Japenese to working longer hours than the Japanese while being less productive than the French (I know these are stereotypes, and that the reality is that productivity is good in all three economies is high – and higher than it was 40 years ago – but it’s still good shorthand for everything wrong with the US labor market).
Joel
Another rich asshole:
James Harrison.
Of course, we’re talking about a great family man who treats women with love and respect.
Here’s an example of a shitty hot take defending the Harrison stance.
Burneko at Deadspin had the best take, though.
p.a.
My friend worked at a CVS warehouse. You get bennies after 6 months. You get laid off after 5 months, and told you can reapply after a few weeks.
schrodinger's cat
Is Amazon an outlier or the norm where work practices are concerned in its industry, that’s what I want to know.
DougJ
@boatboy_srq:
And at least Don got to drink Canadian club throughout those long hours.
Joel
@schrodinger’s cat: Short answer? Probably not.
Right now, Google is putting up a building in Pittsburgh across the street from their initial offices. Right next to the new building is an apartment complex (with insane rents!) populated largely by Google employees.
PurpleGirl
Every time I see references to people working 60 and 80 hours or more a week, I wonder if there is documentation for those numbers. (I.E. do people have time sheets for billing as in law firms that show how many minutes you spent each day working on each client/matter item?) And how much of that time is really spent thinking or writing the report or doing whatever the executive does? I know assistants and secretaries can show how much typing/keyboarding or filing or whatever they’ve done but what about executives?
A week has 168 hours in it; I’d like to know how long do people take for commuting, eating, sleeping, other activities of life? And if they are only getting a few hours of sleep of night, that is very unhealthy and will lead to a host of other problems.
PurpleGirl
@PurpleGirl: How many executives close the door to their office and take a nap in the afternoon…
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@DougJ: and go to movies, and have a fling with Rosemarie DeWitt, and…
aging fratboy macho posturing, I know quite a few people who regularly work a lot more than forty hours a week, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody who does work you can’t do sitting brag about how many hours they work. Pontificating about the benefits of your standing* desk fits under this category too.
*this would also apply to the treadmill desk, but I’ve never actually encountered, even in the internets, anyone who actually has one.
schrodinger's cat
Bad as Amazon is, it is not the most evil joint stock company that ever existed. At least it has not caused mass starvation and death, yet. That honor belongs to the one and only East India Company.
*The post is a part of series that I am doing on India’s colonial rule.
schrodinger's cat
@DougJ: Based on the only season (first) of Mad Men I saw, Don Draper seemed to be doing anything but work in those long hours. Unless the definition of work includes endless hours spent drinking and womanizing, with a few work meetings thrown in.
srv
There is no amount of immigration that this country cannot handle, and it will have no impact on anyone else whatsover. This has been proven.
We live in a truly egalitarian world now, where illegals and Amazon workers are treated with the same respect. Those of you who do not see that are, quite simply, bigots.
Bobby Thomson
You can’t increase SS payments while at the same time drastically reducing the number of people paying into the system. Three guesses which promise Ttump would break, especially with a Republican congress, and the first two don’t count.
low-tech cyclist
Who do Ron Fournier and Fred Hiatt work for?
Can’t speak knowledgeably about Fournier, but Hiatt was like that long before Bezos bought the WaPo.
For whatever reason, the ‘need’ to cut entitlements has long been all but a religious belief at that newspaper. So Hiatt’s never going to have a kind word for someone whose ‘centrism’ or ‘moderation’ includes defending entitlements from cuts.
Belafon
For all of you wondering about long hours, do you know someone who has started his or her own business or works for a company with less than 25 employees? My experience is that people in these regularly pull more than 40 hours per week, generally in the frame of every waking hour except maybe Saturday. Not all of them, mind you (my dentist doesn’t), but jobs like small technology companies, or woodworking/carpentry, or farming, would easily pull more than 40.
schrodinger's cat
@Belafon: Also too, graduate students working on their PhD.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Just Some Fuckhead: On the third side, you have professions like physicians who want to limit importing of doctors. Dean Baker reminds us of this frequently.
The upper-middle class has its own protectionist leanings, also too. Both parties listen to them – a lot.
Cheers,
Scott.
Kay
@PurpleGirl:
I agree with you that it can be fake, but my son works for a big tech company and he works a lot. They just insist he be available constantly. They contacted him just about all day Thanksgiving, for example, which is the only time I saw it but it happened. He’s not that high up. I’m not clear why he’s so essential that they can’t leave him alone for 12 hours.
I think what bugs me about all this is not the exploitation aspects, because obviously these people make a lot more than Amazon warehouse people who they treat like garbage also, but the glorifying and romanticizing of it- as if it’s “new” because they have shiny, hip headquarters and hammocks and they offer them organic food or whatever. He doesn’t buy any of that. He treats it as “they want this and I want this and this is how far I will go”. He’s not chanting their personal leadership life mantra, thank fucking God. That to me is the cringe-inducing part- the Tom Friedman “these people are all genuises and we all must aspire to this”. It’s some kind of intrusion on agency and what I consider a necessary realistic approach for employees. They SHOULD treat it like a transaction. That’s what it is. They are not, in fact, “a family”. He has a family. He doesn’t confuse that with his employer.
They did the same thing with the finance industry. Worship. Those people were all genuineses too. Why are they such gullible dopes, elites? How many times are they going to make the same mistake?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Belafon: to my mind it’s more about smugly bragging about working sixty (or whatever) hours a week, especially since the whole Don Draper idea suggests someone who sees him (I’m pretty comfortable with that assumption) sees himself as an MOTU, and like Paul Ryan includes his time at the gym as work because mensa santo in corporate fuckin’ sauna, dude! and if he hasn’t read Ayn Rand, it’s only because novels are for chicks. And I admit (because I am a political junkie) I made a jump from that to “nobody I know is gonna retire at 65!” and “Social Security was always meant to supplement personal savings, not pay for your retirement” and “I wish I could make a hundred grand a year and get three months vacation!”
Joel
@srv: D-minus trolling. Better than a failing grade, but not enough effort and/or believability.
Elizabelle
Here’s another source for the Luckovich-Amazon cartoon. AJC link did not work for me.
I am no longer buying anything from Amazon, both for their insane work practices (to deliver consumer goods) and for Bezos lying to us all about it. Society can use less Amholes; we have enough self-aggrandizing glibertarians out there. I don’t want the youngs now to believe they have to sink 60-80 hours into workplace to “succeed.”
This is a sacrifice, because I really like them for used (sometimes new) books and DVDs. But no more.
In happier news, scored a pristine boxed set of the complete Deadwood on DVD, all three seasons, for $8 at a local thrift store.
WereBear
Know who works 60 hours a week? The people with two part time jobs.
schrodinger's cat
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: Yesterday I was recounting a story about my friend who graduated at the top of her class in India from Grant Medical, one of the oldest medical schools in India. Did her residency in pediatric oncology at Johns Hopkins, followed by a prestigious fellowship at the NIH. She even authored a couple of chapters in some textbook while she was doing her residency.
Her path to a green card is immensely torturous. It will still take her at least a few more years even to apply for one. I met her this fall she just seems so defeated about everything. She truly is one of the brightest and the best.
Currently she is working at an urban hospital in DC which does not even have a pediatric oncology department.
Elizabelle
@Belafon: Yeah, that’s fine re the over 40, but they’re not being micromanaged and shat against on backchannel company email, and considered worthless if they cannot bring 85 hours of prime quality work per week to the corporation.
Amazon is body and soul-sucking, and I cringe at some of the Amholes commenting at news sites, thinking they are uberhumans.
I don’t want Amazon to get away with these shitty practices. You know they will be coming, in some form, to workplaces near you (when they’re not there already).
schrodinger's cat
@Elizabelle: Did you see my post about the East India company? I have linked to it upstairs. I took what you said to heart and blogged about it.
Sherparick
@boatboy_srq: At least some would prefer that the millions pouring in be as close to slaves as possible, e.g. outlaws without any citizenship rights and subject to deportation. Makes for a pretty docile work force.
The best article out there on immigration out there that I have found is this piece on VOX http://www.vox.com/2015/7/29/9060427/nativism-research-immigration-trump
But even there, it misses some big points. First, the current U.S. population is 315 million people or thereabouts. On a per capita basis,the immigration we are experiencing and the level of foreign born in the U.S., although higher then it was in the period from 1930-1970, is still far lower then what prevailed from the country’s founding in 1776 to 1930 when the anti-immigration laws of the 1920s really started to bite. Those laws of course kept millions of Jewish refugees, as well as political refugees, from escaping the Nazis and thereby were a significant contributor to the Holocaust.
Second, the best estimate of illegal immigrants is around 11.5 million and only about 1/2 come from Mexico and Central and South America. About 2/5ths are Indians, Chinese, Korean, and Filipino and other Asians, and a not insignificant number are Europeans and Africans who have overstayed their visas. But the anxiety is about the Mexicans, is it not? So what is this about, well, it is about kicking someone down on the social scale.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I love that show. If I didn’t already watch Game of Thrones I’d be trying to catch up with it now just because Ian McShane is gonna be on it. Such great writing and so many brilliant performances.
Belafon
@Elizabelle: At my last job, the VP of our group called a 7:45 am meeting specifically to prove to people they could get their a little earlier to get more work done.
Elizabelle
@schrodinger’s cat: Thank you! Will check it out today. Always enjoy your blog, and interested in the topic.
RE your brilliant cancer-fighting friend: we need to make her immigration path more of a glideslope. Can she not qualify for one of the “exceptionally talented” visa types?
Kay
@Elizabelle:
.
It wasn’t just him though. Remember when finance people were the genuises? They were spinning value from straw, or something! No one knew how they were doing it but we all had to adopt their world-view! Eat or be eaten! Then it turned out they were just over-valuing real estate, which doesn’t sound all that clever :)
Sherparick
Yea, the reasons the “Third Wayers” like Fournier, Friedman, and Hiatt dislike Trump are his political incorrectness on getting rid of Social Security, his lack of enthusiasm for endless wars in the Middle East unless it is just “to take the oil,” which takes all the moral highmindedness out of the slaughters, and his general “vulgar” style which they find undignified.,
Belafon
@Belafon: “Get there” not “Get their”. I’ll be glad when my company upgrades the browser.
PurpleGirl
@Kay: I had worked for educational non-profit. We had a lot of field staff who worked only during the school year. One of the coordinators was asked to take a ‘promotion’ — new title, some increased responsibilities, etc — and then they quoted her a ‘raise’. She asked me what I thought. I told her to turn the new salary into a per hour payment and I told her that 35 hours a week for 52 weeks was1820 hours. When she did that it worked out to making less per hour than her salary as a coordinator. It gave her a negotiating tool and she was able to get them to up the raise they offered. I was amazed she had no idea about how many hours that work time was — our employee manual specifically stated that all employees worked 9 to 5, 5 days a week with OT having to be approved by a supervisor. Hours were adjusted for the field staff but it still was congruent to the 35-hour week. (Oh they also tried to tell her some BS about a vacation time but we had 10-paid holidays and the office closed Christmas Eve to New Years Day with pay for everyone. Yes, full time office staff had vacations which had to be taken during the summer.)
Roger Moore
@PurpleGirl:
Or go golfing with their executive buddies and call it work because they occasionally shoot the breeze about business. Or do the same thing over long, expensive meals at fancy restaurants and claim they’re business meetings so they can expense them? In case it’s not obvious, I’m also very suspicious about claims of insanely long work hours absent some kind of documentation.
schrodinger's cat
@Elizabelle: That’s what she is going to try, but since she finished her NIH fellowship (6 years ago) she has done no research at all. Research credentials are tremendously helpful to qualify you as an alien with extraordinary ability. Its a long process, you need a good lawyer and its not cheap, easily 10 grand or more.
ETA: So even in the best case scenario, a couple more years of nail-biting uncertainty.
gogol's wife
So if I stop buying from Amazon and buy from various other online sites, how do I know that they treat their employees well? It’s a serious question.
Elizabelle
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Saving it as a reward for getting through a big task this month. Hear it’s Shakespeare in the brutal wild west, in sepia. Will likely join you in the Ian McShane cult.
Liked this appraisal of it, from NYTimes, as first series its TV critic Alessandra Stanley ever binge-watched.
Roger Moore
@schrodinger’s cat:
And post-docs and assistant professors. Most of them calm down a bit after getting tenure, but until then, the work hours are insane.
PurpleGirl
@PurpleGirl: A couple of times they tried to get me to tell them where I was going on my vacation. I always said ‘out of town and out of touch’. If they wanted me to be available, they’d have to pay me more.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Elizabelle: I’ll be interested to hear what you think of it. I think there are a few Deadwood fans here.
Hoodie
@Kay: Folks with obsessive personalities tend to rise to the top in businesses simply because they care more about whatever transiently important bullshit the organization engages in (in the case of Amazon, shipping cheap Chinese shit by FedEx). Some of these obsessives are aware of their obsessiveness, and don’t expect people working for them to share the same obsession (one of my best managers was like that). This type can be happy with this simply because it gives their lives meaning or they just have quirky personalities. Some of them have a kind of martyr complex and don’t want anyone to emulate them because it might steal their thunder. Many, however, are miserable souls who look to validate their own choices and thus feel powerful by expecting others to emulate them. Other types of managers are just sociopaths, like cult leaders. That type really doesn’t do any real work, they just expect others to slave for them because of their inherent magnificence. Making others grovel is a symbol of power.
daveNYC
What’s funny (not funny) is that Amazon’s practices are pretty similar to that of Enron. Ditching the bottom x%, backstabbing and horse trading to try and keep or promote people in your group, all that jazz.
I can understand the appeal of the idea of constantly getting rid of the worst employees in your company. Just on the surface it sounds like a great idea. It just doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny or long term thinking. When the stakes are paycheck or no paycheck, that ranking system is going to be gamed like anything, and that’s even giving it the benefit of thinking that their ranking system was worth a damn in the first place. That’s not even getting into the issue of whether the difference in performance between the top and bottom of your company large enough to be worth the effort of firing and hiring. Crappy practices like this will just lead to the company eventually eating itself alive due to the toxic culture and eventually someone gaming things to the point where something seriously bad happens. That won’t happen for a while though, and it doesn’t help those who are being crushed between its wheels right now.
Big Law and the finance industry can have equally crappy conditions, but at least there you’re getting paid fat wads of cash (maybe). The people at Amazon are getting paid regular tech wages that they could be getting at any of a number of nearby companies that aren’t nearly as hellish to work at.
And the conditions for the warehouse workers is complete bullshit.
Botsplainer
Been looking at the whole Subway Jared thing this AM – it’s brutal. He sought girls in the 14-16 range, and was arranging for paid sex with them at hotels. Even worse was the child porn – the foundation director had cameras scattered about his home and was sending Jared imagery of kids as young as six, apparently.
There’s talk of a wider ring.
Debbie
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I loved Deadwood. I think it was the first time I binge watched.
Botsplainer
Gawker actually had a non-troll story up. The allegations are too awful for snark.
http://gawker.com/fbi-subway-jared-paid-for-sex-with-at-least-14-minors-1725047624
boatboy_srq
@Belafon: It’s probably a mistake to lump entrepreneurs such as you describe in with ordinary workers: startup is always difficult and takes a lot more time and energy than ordinary salaried employment. With that said, though, the fascination with all-startup-all-the-time employment practices has got to end unless the goal really is to burn out everyone on the payroll or ever going to be on it.
raven
I just had Herman Cain and Ben Carson on the radio. They were gushing about the economic miracle that was America from 1776 to 1876.
Brachiator
@BGinCHI:
I know. Let’s go shopping at WalMart instead.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Brachiator: somebody should come up with an iPhone app that lets people know how companies treat their workers
ETA: and yes, I do have an iPhone
Belafon
@raven: All I can think of is “Do they even know what they are talking about?”
Elizabelle
@Brachiator: Counting on the BJ contingent to keep me posted on whether Amazon’s sales and revenue tanks in the coming weeks: it might very well do so.
Still interested in how Disney is doing, after its experiment with firing its Orlando IT department and giving their jobs to H-1Bs and outsourcing. That seems a blatant misuse of the H-1B program — replacing permanent workers is not the intent — and I’d like to see the Dept of Labor or Justice, even, read them the riot act.
Chris
@raven:
Slavery, yay!
cintibud
Here is an article with some pushback to those insane hours:
EDIT – not seeing the link, trying this:
http://tinyurl.com/m4n483o
WereBear
@Elizabelle: Yeah, kinda like how Microsoft and its blatant game-rigging was taken to task by the Justice Department… oh wait, the Bush Administration made that go away, didn’t they?
This is part of my lifelong personal boycott of the PC, first the Amiga and then, when Amiga was destroyed by Microsoft, buying only Apple. But I also love the way Apple stuff works, so such choices are personal and vary from person and place.
Brachiator
@raven:
It wasn’t an economic miracle?
The Thin Black Duke
@Belafon: Because it worked in Atlas Shrugged, duh.
Belafon
@WereBear: And then Apple had to be sued because they were misusing the software that Safari was based on.
Archon
@Elizabelle:
Deadwood and Rome are two shows I wish HBO would have let play out. I don’t know why Deadwood only got a few seasons (I assume lackluster ratings) with Rome I read it was because the production costs were exorbitant.
Brachiator
@Gin & Tonic:
Stack ranking, which amazon appears to be using, was notoriously associated with Jack Welch and GE. Microsoft also tried it for a time.
http://qz.com/428813/ge-performance-review-strategy-shift/
It is a profoundly stupid way of viewing employees. But new tech companies seem to be in love with what they think are new and disruptive models, when they are often just a bunch of fools re-inventing not a wheel, but a flat tire.
Kay
@PurpleGirl:
You just hope they see the inequity in this “devoted” idea. Devotion is supposed to be reciprocal. So if you’re going to be a company who fires people constantly and really can’t put up with outrageous employee demands like having children, can you then demand devotion to the Principles of Bezos?
That has to work both ways. So if you were almost guaranteed a career-long position in 1962 that indicated some devotion was in order. You could make that deal and get some benefit. You really could pretend it was a “family”. But if it’s just cut-throat stack ranking, well, that should work two ways and you shouldn’t have to recite the company motto.
schrodinger's cat
@Elizabelle:
.
Aww thanks! Suggestions and feedback are welcome. I always struggle between how much exposition is necessary and how much will make it completely boring.
Elizabelle
@Brachiator: I think the tech world, and glibertarians, are more comfortable with numbers and thus quantitative approaches.
They don’t understand that some qualities cannot be ranked.
Also that quantitative can be biased as well; depends on the inputs and is highly subjective.
MomSense
I think this is the result of years of zero sum mindset. It is the dominant organizing principle in our culture. If the only way I win is when you lose or I get as much out of you as possible, you end up with this Amazon business model. The warehouse workers are screwed as are Walmart workers, fast food workers, retail workers, sweatshop workers, nannies, child care workers, domestics, nail salon technicians, and so many others.
The stock market loves it when companies increase productivity which has become fewer employees doing more for less. As bad as it is for US workers, would any of us want to be a worker in Bangladesh? I’m not saying this as an excuse to ignore the problem just that multinational corporations view labor as just another resource to exploit. They call it winning. You hear Trump say all the time that he all he does is win. I betcha some of the housekeepers and kitchen staff feel the burden of his winning.
Roger Moore
@boatboy_srq:
There was an article on Vox that I think got to the core of the Amazon issue pretty well. Their argument was that Amazon has been operating in start-up mode continuously since it was founded. Rather than taking its successful business and shifting into money making mode, Amazon has sacrificed profitability to keep prices low and attract more business, and plowed whatever operating profits it makes into further expansion. But part of that is that they’ve kept demanding the kind of extreme effort that start-ups require even as the company has grown. That kind of thing works OK for start-ups because the early employees who are asked to work that way know what they’re getting in for and are given equity stakes in the company as an enticement and reward if they get the business off the ground. I doubt it’s going to work well for a big multi-national company that can’t offer vast riches to everyone.
Fair Economist
@schrodinger’s cat:
Quite possibly the worst, but far from the only; some other similar exemplars of corporate evil include the Dutch East India Company and the International Association of the Congo, King Leopold’s shell company that conquered the Congo.
Looking forward to your series. It sounds really interesting.
MomSense
@Kay:
Bezos has layers of people between him and the exploited workers so he never has to face the consequences of his business practices on the lives of his employees.
Elizabelle
I think the Amazon workplace practices should be front and center in the presidential election.
Is this the kind of workplace we want to subject our people to? How much choice do Amazon workers have, actually?
This is an extraction economy, applied to people in their prime (at HQ) and to anyone they can get to show up (in the warehouses).
It’s sociopathic. I realize Amazon is not the only transgressor, but maybe Jeff Bezos deserves to be the poster child.
We’re not, societally, benefitting from the insane hours Goldman Sachs and investment bankers spend working, and why can’t Amazon fulfill consumer purchases with more regular hours?
Kropadope
@Elizabelle:
My mom can probably keep them afloat herself.
schrodinger's cat
@MomSense: Poor Bangladesh, exploited under the British, then West Pakistan after independence and now the multinationals of globalization 2.0. As if being raped and pillaged once is not enough, they have to endure it again and again. More than India, Bangladesh is in need of reparations from the British, for strip mining Bengal of all its assets since 1757.
Elizabelle
@Roger Moore: And Amazon corporate employees are not vested for, what? — two years. They have to pay back their highly generous signing bonuses if they leave before a year, and have to repay a lot of their relocation expenses if they don’t stay the full two.
Good point about staying a start-up. Bezos should not be allowed to get away with that. In some fashion, he’s not — a lot of tech types won’t work at Amazon. They’re having to recruit more heavily for more entry level types to churn and burn.
Satanic digital mills.
Elizabelle
@Kropadope: Does your mom know about the NYTimes story (which is just the latest iteration, on a more prominent platform; Seattle and other papers have known about Amazon for years…)
Would that make a difference to her? Or is she so geographically or physically isolated?
sigaba
@raven: You mean when we had a 20% tariff on everything and we plowed all that money into subsidized canals and railroads? And we also tripled out square mileage by gun and saber?
Fair Economist
@Sherparick:
Not only that, the Mexicans pretty much stopped coming in 2008, but the Asians and Europeans continue to come. IOW, it’s all about the racism – here targeting a group of people who genetically mostly are American Indians, the folks the USA ethnically cleansed/genocided off the land. It’s the moral remains of the USA’s *other* original sin (besides slavery).
MomSense
@schrodinger’s cat:
It’s a terrible history of exploitation and climate change is going to be disastrous for them, too.
Belafon
@Elizabelle:
Now that is definitely no different than any other company that offers bonuses. I was required to stay 18 months at my current job or I would lose my bonus.
trollhattan
@Kay:
Recent letter to my dead-tree paper crowed, “Of course CEOs deserve their pay. They have to be on call day and night, unlike everybody who’s complaining about their high pay. They earn it!!!” By that measure, I’m guessing about a quarter of our workforce are CEOs. They should all demand CEO money.
schrodinger's cat
@Fair Economist: I am sure they were terrible and worse than the East India Company in many aspects. However, the sheer scope of the East India Company’s activities dwarfs the exploits of similar entities.
At the beginning there were Portuguese, French, Dutch and even Danes in India. The British East India company was most successful, even though the Portuguese were there first. The French and the Brits vied for hegemony in India like they did elsewhere in the world. the Dutch and Danish presence was minor and unimportant in the large scheme of things where India was concerned.
Belafon
@Roger Moore: Actually, the feeding back into the company rather than just building up profits actually seems quite admirable. If you’re feeding the money back in, then employees are getting paid with it, which is why they are still hiring. Compare that to WalMarts using profits to buy back company stock.
trollhattan
@Belafon:
What is this “bonus” of which you speak? Some kind of corporate unicorn?
Chris
@schrodinger’s cat:
I love this line:
When you’ve pissed off three people with such wildly differing viewpoints… you’re probably doing something bad.
schrodinger's cat
@Belafon: Isn’t Amazon buying back stock too? Its a pretty common place practice keeping the stock price high. Why exactly is the Amazon stock price so high when their profit margins have been razor thin at best.
Fair Economist
@schrodinger’s cat:
It’s quite fascinating that a single company was able to take over such an enormous, wealthy (before they got to it) and populous region. They also did it with much less of a technological advantage than most of the other examples – they frequently fought Indian principalities with guns and even cannon. Also a good lesson in how moral a company is when only the “free market” constrains it.
schrodinger's cat
@Fair Economist: They bid their time. The East India Company was in India since 1610. Their first major territorial gain was in 1757. Tax collection and outright looting is what made them rich not trade or the free market. They were a monopoly. I too am fascinated by their success, hence this series.
@Chris: They were pissed off with the Company for different reasons.
Adam Smith because they were a monopoly, Karl Marx because of their exploitation and Burke was not happy about the corrosive effect the Company had on British institutions including the Parliament.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
There are still some employers out there that get the idea of loyalty as a two way street. For example, I’ve heard people say that P&G still looks for people who want to be life-long employees, and they maintain old-fashioned ideas like a company stock plan and promoting from within (all the way up to the C-suite, which is stocked with lifers) as a way of achieving it. Unsurprisingly, the companies that are willing to be loyal to their employees get repaid by unusual loyalty from their employees.
Kay
@trollhattan:
It really is much better now, though. “Just in time” scheduling used to be portrayed as “flexible schedules for work-life balance!” It was ALL a white collar analysis. I can work at my job AND build houses for the homeless!
Now there’s at least talk of a federal law mandating that employers can’t make people sit by the phone without paying them. Low wage emplorers really took that “flexibility” bullshit and ran with it.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@daveNYC: Microsoft did this, finally dropped it only last year, I think. The results can be seen in their OS right now. What a fucking travesty. Catastrophic, for them.
Miss Bianca
@schrodinger’s cat:
I love this article! Thank you for writing about the East India Company!
Roger Moore
@schrodinger’s cat:
The assumption is that at some point they will have driven all the competition out of business, at which point they can raise prices, stop angling for exponential growth, and start putting out big fat dividends.
Matt McIrvin
@PurpleGirl: Software people who claim to work long hours are often just hanging out at the office for long hours, because they don’t have much of a social or family life outside the office. They may be mentally marinating great code ideas, but they can probably also do that outside of the office.
IT support people who have to be on call, though… they often spend weeks in which they do 40 hours at the office, but nearly all of their other waking hours are spent working from home on some breaking disaster or other, and many of those hours are at 2, 3, 4 AM, so they don’t get much continuous sleep.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@joes527: Also the base is gullible and gets lied to all the time. Republicans (at least the smart ones) never say they want to cut Social Security or Medicare – they say they want to “reform entitlements”. To your average oldster, entitlements are welfare and food stamps, not SS and Medicare.
Trump is telling the base what it wants to hear, which is no illegals, but yes to Social Security and Medicare. He’s smart enough to know what’s popular with the average republican voter and doesn’t give a shit what’s popular with the donor class. That in particular is probably why he’s trouncing “lets privatize Social Security and phase out Medicare” JEB! JEB! says what the donor class wants to hear into live mikes. He’s only supposed to be saying that stuff behind closed doors but he’s too stupid to know better.
schrodinger's cat
@Roger Moore: Or is it also because they are buying their stock back and artificially raising its price.
ETA: I don’t really know, I haven’t studied their SEC filings or their annual report in depth.
schrodinger's cat
@Miss Bianca: Thanks much!
Miss Bianca
you know, with regard to the Amazon thing…it’s not just people who work for them directly, obviously. The online hardware store I was hired to manage has had to come up with a whole new marketing plan after being arbitarily dumped by Amazon. One customer complaint like “this product is not the same color as in the photo” (which was actually Amazon’s fault, since they linked our product to the WRONG photo – it happens) and bam, you’re gone. While I was looking into the appeal process, I discovered heart-rending tales of people who basically got driven out of business because they expanded to meet Amazon customer demand, and then just like that they were booted off. You can appeal, but they usually don’t even bother to respond. I’d love to see a class-action lawsuit initiated against these *frellers* for their labor practices, but I’d also love a pony…
Kay
@Roger Moore:
I do but I tend to value “loyalty” just as a person and we only have two employees. I actually hired the employee who has been here the longest (and is hugely valuable). She was 7 months pregnant and I admired how brave it was for her to be looking for a job, because she immediately needed 3 months off after one month. Great hire. She now has 3 kids. She is unflappable and also really discrete, which is important in a law office in a small town. Her husband is a police officer so he knows a lot about local people too, but if they gossip about their work I’ve never seen evidence of it.
Matt McIrvin
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Microsoft did stack ranking, but they didn’t necessarily fire everyone who was in the bottom category every quarter, like Neutron Jack did. They’d sort of tell you you were on notice and try to figure out what was wrong. Which might, of course, have been nothing, if everyone in the department was actually fine but somebody had to be on the bottom.
They still spent an extraordinary amount of time and resources on this really heavyweight and soul-crushing evaluation process.
Auntie Anne
So I once had a job offer from the Amholes. It was, without a doubt, the worst job offer I’ve ever received. At the time in my location, you got to work for 365 days as a temp, and if you didn’t get an offer, you were gone. So I got my offer on day 363 only after I told them I had another offer. It was for less than half of the other offer, and the much-vaunted stock option was for all of $1000, for which I had to stick around for a year. And the Amholes were shocked I didn’t take their offer instead.
Kropadope
@Elizabelle: She gets most of her news from Fox, so I have no idea if she ever heard about this.
boatboy_srq
@trollhattan: Humph. Show me the CEO of anything besides a tech company who gets paged at 3 am when the contractor 12 time zones away can’t log in.
boatboy_srq
@Miss Bianca: Walmart and Vlasic all over again.
schrodinger's cat
@boatboy_srq: That’s what monopolies do, although technically Amazon and Walmart in your case is an example of monopsony (many sellers, one buyer).
Tree With Water
“Media elites pimp donor class-style “centrism” because they work for members of the donor class. The end”.
I’ve never understood why the term “class warfare” grew to connote someone or something as being “un-American”. It’s nothing of the sort. It’s a accurate word that describes political reality in the United States of America.
boatboy_srq
@Tree With Water: It’s “un-American” because there are no classes in Ahmurrcan society. There are only Good Upstanding Righteous Xtian Caucasian Hetero Patriotic Real Ahmurrcans™ and Those People.
Thoughtful Today
Noteworthy:
CBS’s political director John Dickerson’s ‘Face The Nation’ round-table had:
Right-wing @$$ Ron Fournier,
Republican propagandists Peggy Noonan & Mark Halperin,
Fraking right-wing National Review’s Robert Costa,
and for ‘balance’:
Slate-pitchy Jamelle Bouie, whose Slate’y right-wing neoliberalism streaks through much of his writing.
Brachiator
@Elizabelle:
You might be right. I listened to a few tech podcasts which covered this story, and was surprised at how often people understood or sided with amazon.To be fair, they thought that expecting sick people to just suck it up was too much, but otherwise an attitude expressed was, “if they don’t like it” or “can’t take it,” they should just work somewhere else. No clue that some work practices might be unfair or oppressive.
Also, I wonder whether part of the problem is that increasingly tech management is global. They don’t know about, or care about any American (or any other country’s) labor practices or traditions of worker rights.
Julie
@Roger Moore: While they certainly have their issues like most global brands, Starbucks does this too, to their credit.
I worked closely with executives from both Microsoft and Amazon (and Starbucks, too, actually) in a previous job and can attest to just how completely crazy their corner of the tech industry is. It’s absolutely breathtaking — and spills over into the companies that provide services to them. It’s a really broken system.