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this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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And then the problem will correct itself.
It's economics, but with people as the commodity being valued.
Amazon currently has a wide labor pool to pull from, and so the value of any individual person is very low. As they saturate the market with people who are bitter and angry about working for Amazon, the pool will shrink, in this case, faster than the rate they lose people. There is a critical point where the growth of the "will never work for Amazon" pool of people will grow exponentially, and as they struggle to hire replacements, workplace conditions will improve. They will not improve before that moment, however.
Because Amazon doesn't see people as people. They see people as a resource to extract value from.
This isn't a problem unique to Amazon, everyone reading this can probably name at least one company they've worked for that did something similar, but Amazon is an outlier for how aggressively they've embraced that idea.
This is a problem endemic to capitalism, as Amazon succeeds, more companies will be forced to adopt those practices on order to compete. Reducing the options people have to avoid Amazon like conditions, and lowering the bar for acceptable workplace culture.
The only defense we have against this is to unionize. Aggressively. The current push should look like nothing more than a warning shot.
If you can organize your workplace and get 75% of the employees in the union, you can write your own check. At a word, 75% of the workforce walking out absolutely cripples any employer. They know that, they don't want the union because they don't want you to have any power in the relationship. It's your life, and they want the keys to it. Take the keys back.
Agree with everything you said. They will also aggressively replace human workers with robots, AI, etc.
These technologies should make life better for working people, but in general I fear they will not. They'll just concentrate the wealth even faster.
This is a problem inherent to capitalism. It only seeks to raise capital and will exploit every resource to do so. As soon as a resource is no longer useful, it is discarded.
Not just Google.
We've had "Human Resource" departments for decades.
Preach it!
This is exactly why “Human Resources” offends me to the core. I am a person to be valued, not a resource to be managed.