Quote:
Originally Posted by ProfCrash
If Amazon was not paying over time, violating labor laws, violating health and safety laws, doing a whole number of things I would be upset.
Amazon is hiring temporary workers to fill repetitive, crappy jobs during peak times. If there is not enough work they are sending people home.
Wow that is awful.
There is a time and place for government to step in, all of your examples are bad things that should be regulated. Hiring temps and when to send people home a shift are not.
I shop at Target because they treat their employees well, far better than Walmart. I shop at Amazon because I can get diapers at a great price.
I hope the US federal government raises the minimum wage, it needs to go up.
I hope that the US as a whole can find solutions to the high drop out rate from high school. If that number decreases, then the number of folks who are desperate for a job will decrease and companies like Amazon will have to hire more full time folks because there will be fewer people willing to work temp jobs.
But I am not going to blame Amazon for using the same business model every major, and most minor, companies use.
Companies should be held to a standard but individuals need to take responsibility for their own choices as well. There has to be a balance.
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Amazon is refraining from engaging in the acts that I mentioned above because they are illegal, not out of the kindness of its heart. Its business practices seem much more similar to Walmart's than to Target's or Costco's, which leads me to believe that it wouldn't hesitate to do less if it could get away with it. Paying minimum wage is just another way to say "I would pay you less if I could." The incidents mentioned in the article do not seem particularly abhorrent on their own but they, along with reports of similar or inferior conditions in the United States, as well as Amazon's ridiculously low effective tax rate, paint a rather negative picture of its corporate practices.
The problem with advocating an equal responsibility between workers and employers is that it assumes both groups have equal power, which is almost never the case.