As of 2019, Amazon employed 798,000 employees, so we're looking at almost 1 million people, earning $15/hour at a minimum, with 401(k), health, vision, and dental benefits. Absolutely nuts.
I'd be really surprised if these were real- '401(k), health, vision, and dental benefits'. Anyone can offer 401k without matching, medical without contributing to the premium.
I'm pretty sure they could start paying a minimum wage of $30 an hour and people would be irate that they're making it impossible to hire anyone because Amazon is overpaying. When you're the biggest player there is nowhere to hide.
This probably won't be too far off, if the current level of unemployment benefits holds. Just the $600 a week on top of state benefits comes out to $15/hr.
Correct, because SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus and contains no DNA. But the test does work by detecting the viral RNA and it is hard to find the specific stuff (reagents) to perform the test and that's a big reason why we're all sheltering in place without a proper nationwide testing regime.
Not talking about it in absolute terms. How about talking about it in terms of median wage per job title? Putting big numbers in glitzy blog posts only serves to dazzle and obfuscates how easy it would be for Amazon to double or triple that number with basically no dent in the wallet from doing so.
You think Amazon could spend an extra $700 million to $1.4 billion with "basically no dent in the wallet"? I guess I understand why you're frustrated if you think that's the case, but it's just not true.
Jeff Bezos owns 55.55M shares of Amazon stock (https://www.secform4.com/insider-trading/1043298.htm). Since just April 1st, the value of that stock has increased by ~55.55M*($2400 - $1900) = $27.775B. I know net_worth != cash, but he can and routinely does (see link above) liquidate stock to fund other projects.
In this context, I think $700M is equivalent to a coin tossed in a fountain.
That's fair. This cashflow is obviously not available to Amazon directly, but I could see an argument that Jeff Bezos specifically ought to make more funds available. (Maybe he will - if you believe the headlines he was entirely hands-off the retail business until recently.)
And this is not an annualized number, they started the pay increase last month. This is a huge figure, especially for a their razor thin margin retail business.
If you had an intended figure in terms of the median wage by employee class at AMZN, we could pretty easily get a good guess for that in terms of dollars and cents by looking at Glassdoor or Payscale. Conversely, you could provide the sort of median wage ratio you were thinking of, such that you'd be satisfied with Amazon's response; and we could compare them the other way around.
If you find the wording of GGP's question incorrect, can I ask what compensation level you would have preferred Amazon provide, either in absolute terms OR relative to some other measure?
I didn't know what you meant. I thought you meant what you said. I'm grateful that the parent gave you a chance to clarify, and don't see this as a "derailment". Surely you aren't impugning their motive?
That’s what I have to pay as a small employer to keep people for basic assembly and packaging during this. That’s what I felt was fair, since that’s what unemployment pays in my state. I figured I have to at least match that, so I did. I had to let a few people go and scale back, but helped them all navigate the UI claim’s process. Paid out their PTO balance to hold them over. I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night asking people to come to work for less knowing it would endanger them and pay them less than literally being unemployed and staying at home. I will bring them all back as soon as I can. I let them all keep their health insurance for the time being, which I pay for 100%.
If a small 10 person shop can do it, so can Amazon.
The idea that anyone, anywhere in the US, is making less than $20/hr during this is morally repugnant to me.
> Millions of masks have been distributed across our network. They are available to all Amazon associates, delivery service partners, Amazon Flex participants, seasonal employees, and Whole Foods Market stores employees. We are encouraging everyone to take and use them.
As for testing, they have been unable to do it through regular channels so they are building a lab to do it themselves:
> An important safety step might be regular testing of all employees for COVID-19, including those without symptoms. We have begun assembling equipment we need to build our first lab to process tests and hope to start testing small numbers of our frontline employees soon.
As for cleanliness:
> We have increased the frequency and intensity of cleaning at all sites, including regular sanitization of door handles, handrails, touch screens, scanners, and other frequently touched areas.
> Our enhanced cleaning has added almost 200 additional points of contact per site across our janitorial teams, and we’ve increased the size of our cleaning teams threefold to support our buildings.
> We require everyone to wash their hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds, especially after using the bathroom and before eating, as well as after blowing their nose, coughing, or sneezing. If soap and water are not readily available, alcohol-based hand sanitizer stations are easily accessible throughout our buildings.
> In addition to break times, employees can log out of their system to wash their hands whenever they choose, without worrying about impact on their performance goals.
Amazon has by now spent millions of man-hours on addressing COVID-19 -- meetings, designing splash banners, etc. They are a very big company who pays big money for top talent. Amazon is not the scrappy upstart it was 15 years ago. Let's hold them accountable according to what they are capable.
Edit: it would seem obvious in retrospect that if most major governments have action plans in case of global pandemic, a global logistics company should have done the same. I would be very surprised if they hadn't, frankly, and my view of Bezos would be lower than it already is if they hadn't because this is really something that should have mattered to him before it was a real situation.
Frankly, I'm quite surprised Amazon, FedEx, UPS and USPS have done as well as they have under these conditions.
Yes, you can plan to some extent... but these are PEOPLE heavy issues. The only way this would have gone without issue is if it was pretty much ONLY robots, and had 3-4x the number of people needed, skilled and trained to support those robots, and that the robots themselves were under 25% utilization to begin with.
Telling a company they need to spend 4-5X as much for operations, just in case of a once a centuray global pandemic, is pretty unlikely.
Now, if you want to talk about getting domestic sourcing of more products, particularly in infrastructure, defense, medicine and communications/tech, I'm all ears. There's no reason more than half of medicine and telecom/tech equipment should be foreign sourced for a country the size/scale of the US as a matter of defense. With where we're at with China and Iran (effects on Taiwan of particular concern), it's even more amazing there aren't more talks about this.
I'm so tired of this holier-than-thou "they should know better/be better prepared" bullshit. Once-in-a-century black swan event - yeah, every company should definitely have plans for something like this!
Moving massive resources in an effort like this is no small feat, and trying to treat it like it's as simple as signing people up to Slack is silly. It's amazing how people think operations like just magically manifest "because".
Even companies with “pandemic” plans have a kind of outline of cascading triggers but a lot of the resulting triggers are undefined and those are things which basically say ($leadership) convenes talks things over and develop emergent plans and offer to their lower managers who take that and develop their own plans accordingly. And then that has to be revised with feedback from staff , etc...
I've had some opportunity to have insight into corporate pandemic planning over the years.
It's important to understand that U.S. corporate planning for a pandemic has assumed a certain level of urgency and competency from the federal response.
This has been reasonable, as the federal government has for the last 20 years, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, taken potential pandemics very seriously, and responded aggressively to them.
The federal response to the 2019 novel coronavirus has completely failed to live up to these expectations and the result is that everyone is scrambling to catch up. Corporations and states are following their playbooks... but those playbooks were not written in terms of "let's be ready to fill in for the federal government when they fall on their faces." The whole point of the federal government is to be a backstop for everyone else in the face of huge national threats.
This is one reason you're seeing Republican lawmakers be so willing to pump money out of the government: they know the government screwed up the early response, and so it is fair that the government should pay to help mitigate that.
Most major Governments have an ability to print money on will, and yet they were caught red handed in handling covid19. Not to mention that the entire mandate of government is to keep their country safe as first thing, and yet their incompetence was on fully display. I for one, am glad that private companies didn't copy the government.
As someone reading through this thread, I have some feedback for you. This is partly to test the commonly held view that feedback is desired instead of blindly voting and partly to help you. I piped it through `base64` so that you can ignore it if you don't feel like it:
Thanks. I read it. I'm curious where is the mental block that prevents people from seeing the point I'm trying to make. Am I brow-beating around the bush too much, neither clearly nor concisely?
I'm not convinced, as it creates the possibility of egregious violations of community standards being difficult for moderators to detect.
Less of an issue, but still worth some thought: Just like paywalled submissions must be by-passable so that we can all share in a conversation equally, base64 threatens to create subthreads that are not equally accessible. (Trivial easy if you are on a laptop, not on mobile).
That's a fair point. Acting in good faith I had not considered abuse of the technique.
I've often wondered what a forum would look like where you could make the equivalent of 'aside' comments. The way someone might, while you're speaking, say softly "hyPERbolee, not HYper-bowl" to correct you without interrupting.
Perhaps a good example is StackOverflow's Q&A format w/ comments and chats. You can comment and move to chats but the emphasis is on the important part: the question and the answers.
Allowing voting on these "asides" in StackOverflow permits all of the usual stuff while relegating them to the asides they are.
Of course, in the case of what I used it for, it is generally impolite to offer advice unasked but the nature of slow feedback loops means it's better for me to offer an ignorable piece of thing. i.e. if you think I'm an idiot, I want you to have the power to ignore me. That is only polite to compensate for the brain-hacking strength of having text describe you. You can't ignore it afterwards.
>I've often wondered what a forum would look like where you could make the equivalent of 'aside' comments. The way someone might, while you're speaking, say softly "hyPERbolee, not HYper-bowl" to correct you without interrupting.
That would either be PMs, or the forum equivalent of posting "sage" on an imageboard (which prevents the post from bumping,) neither of which HN supports.
Although given the forum's focus on quality over quantity, I think some kind of "whisper" mode might be worth looking at, to opt out of having such comments from appear on the new comments page.
Yeah, I considered PMs but they're really not the same because the point is that everyone benefits with low attention contribution. The whisper mode is totally what I was thinking of.
They could be comments that are automatically marked dead for everyone but the intended recipient. People with showdead on already self-select for higher noise content anyway.
Those aren't facts, those are PR slogans from a blog post on Amazon's web site. I am not holding my breath to see whether these policies are enacted in good faith, given Amazon's business practices and labor relations of late.
I'm being specific about the framing and the narrative that is constructed when well-meaning users parrot corporate talking points in an organic setting like a public Internet forum.
This article mentions 300 people, which isn't a very big fraction of Amazon employees. I'm sure some employees who aren't participating sympathize, but what number would convince you that the "vast majority" think it's fine?
> We’ve extended the increased hourly pay outlined below through May 16. We are also extending double overtime pay in the U.S. and Canada. These extensions increase our total investment in pay during COVID-19 to nearly $700 million for our hourly employees and partners. In addition, we are providing flexibility with leave of absence options, including expanding the policy to cover COVID-19 circumstances, such as high-risk individuals or school closures. We continue to see heavy demand during this difficult time and the team is doing incredible work for our customers and the community.
None of this really disagrees with the article; it's an issue because people typically on a leave of absence don't get paid (notice the lack of "paid leave").
No, but saying look at all they're doing without addressing kind of the key part of the article does kind of miss the point, and makes your response seem more like a response from PR then a comment on the text.
The key part, from an Amazon warehouse worker perspective, is that they're not extending the unlimited unpaid time off option. Huge loss in scheduling flexibility.
“If any team members are unable or unwilling to work a scheduled shift, they can use unlimited unpaid time off through the month of April without penalty, and we are supportive if someone chooses to stay home.”
They are providing inventory to a bunch of other retailers and are continuing online sales, this really sounds like they don't want people coming in and touching the same piece of glass.
Inventory is a lot easier to manage when you don't have to send it to 500 different sites and predict demand. If you're coming up short on inventory, the reasonable choice is to put it into one central repository and ship from there. There are several different configurations for each type of device, varying based on color, memory, and carrier.
If they were only concerned about the virus, they would take the display models out of the showroom and continue to process pick-up orders. And they wouldn't shut down stores worldwide (ex-China).
No health body has recommended worldwide retail shutdowns, and no competing device vendor has closed all of its stores worldwide (ex-China). This is a ramification of the factory shutdowns we saw in China several weeks ago.
Disney is also hemorrhaging cash with their parks closed. Along with resorts and cruises. And their TV advertising just vanished with losing all live sports. The next earnings season is going to be insane.
> We’re also announcing that we are matching our employee donations two-to-one to support COVID-19 response efforts locally, nationally and internationally.
Plus everyone is still getting paid:
> All of our hourly workers will continue to receive pay in alignment with business as usual operations. We have expanded our leave policies to accommodate personal or family health circumstances created by COVID-19 — including recovering from an illness, caring for a sick loved one, mandatory quarantining, or childcare challenges due to school closures.
I don't know whether to be happy that a major American company has publically said such things, or carry on being disgusted that such a thing is not normal and is worth a PR announcement.
Seriously, Apple's leave policy didn't include "recovering from an illness"??
I work at Apple. I’ve not reviewed the new guidelines but can confirm that yes, Apple do indeed let you take sick time to recover from an illness. Of course they do.
In fact, the only time I ever had to interact with Apple HR about time off was when I wanted 3 months off after my kid was born. I ended up getting paid for all of it except the last week. Any other time I’ve taken sick leave I just need to let my manager know, and I took 2 weeks once when I was hit by a car.
Don’t get the wrong idea, I don’t take sick leave at the drop of a hat, but I’ve been here for 15 years, and life happens. I currently have the max-possible 240 hours of sick leave available. In my view, Apple are fairly generous for a US company regarding sick leave. US companies pale in comparison to EU companies, but that’s the US for you.
