It's almost as if Amazon is being criticised for offering the jobs in the first place, and instead they are being saddled with the entire burden of the issues homeless people face. I think that is unfair. What Amazon agreed to do is essentially look the other way on issues which employers usually see as reasons to not hire. It is very clearly seasonal work and there are many benefits to doing that work which might lead to more reliable jobs in the future.
Yep, you beat me to it. It's like a variant on the old joke[1]:
"You must be a profiteer."
'Sure, I guess I count as one. How'd you know?'
"Well, you learned about the immense, tragic problem of homelessness, and apparently your first thought was, wow, awesome, a cheap labor force I can use to cut costs!"
'Hm, okay, fair enough. You must be a philosopher then.'
"Yes! You're right! How'd you know?"
'Well, because homelessness has been around for ages, and appears to be intractable, and you've been unable to make any real progress on it, and yet when I offer homeless people an alternative to their current state, and some of them take it, somehow, the whole problem is all my fault."
>Well, because homelessness has been around for ages, and appears to be intractable
It's not at all intractable. Giving jobs to the jobless and homes to the homeless is exactly as straightforward as it looks.
The homeless and jobless serve a function, though - to keep wages and agitation down for the precariously employed and the precariously housed. They're like this mainly for the benefit of corporations like Amazon which farm cheap labor.
Effectively the homeless serve as a form of 'public good' for the owners of capital.
That's why proposals to house or give homeless jobs with government money are met with sheer disgust by the same media that happily endorses spending billions of dollars dropping bombs on brown children.
It is not straightforward at all. Most homeless people suffer from a mental illness. You'd have to treat that first. Some of them might not want to be treated though...
The notion that the owners of capital would want to have homeless people is absurd. The "capitalists" would like everyone to be working, as higher production means more profits for them. The state may need to step in with a minimum wage (or basic income), but otherwise the system should work fine.
>It is not straightforward at all. Most homeless people suffer from a mental illness.
Unsurprisingly unemployment and homelessness and being told that it's all your fault causes mental illness, especially when combined with attempts to self medicate with drugs or alcohol.
>The notion that the owners of capital would want to have homeless people is absurd. The "capitalists" would like everyone to be working, as higher production means more profits for them.
More unemployed + homeless
=> More afraid workers
=> Workers who are willing to take a lower wage
=> Higher profits
The notion that higher production automatically leads to higher profits is pretty comical.
>>It is not straightforward at all. Most homeless people suffer from a mental illness.
>Unsurprisingly unemployment and homelessness and being told that it's all your fault causes mental illness, especially when combined with attempts to self medicate with drugs or alcohol.
Achievement unlocked: Trivialized mental illness.
Being homeless is certainly stressful on the psyche, but not every crazy homeless person started as a sane homeless person. Some people just cannot function as independent adults. One person I know managed to score Section 8 housing, and she trashed the apartment and threatened the landlord and ended up on the street. Until her condition deteriorated enough for the police to call a 5150 on her.
But she doesn't consider herself crazy. Just stressed out. Modern liberation theory means the institutions consider her to be an adult, so if she says she doesn't want to stay in an asylum, then there's no way for us non-super-rich people to stop her from leaving psychiatric care and ruining her life.
There is no firm boundary between crazy and sane, and even being delusional doesn't prevent one from being a productive member of society. We just don't have enough appropriate services for all the crazy people in this country.
>The state may need to step in with a minimum wage
Taking away a low-skilled worker's best bargaining chip (the willingness to work for less money), is generally not a good way to support their ability to gain employment. It does really help middle class teenagers though.
Allowing people to work for less would cause a race to the bottom in which nobody would make enough to survive.
We've seen the tech giants collude to suppress wages, imagine what fast food companies would do if they realized there was no floor to wages.
Finally, I flatly refuse to accept that people are undeserving of a minimal standard of comfort. Just because somebody doesn't know how to code, or hold other marketable skills does not mean we should not value them and the quality of their existence.
I support a universal basic income as a replacement to the status quo, but don't pretend that a minimum wage is a way of "valuing someone and the quality of their existence". It's simply not. It's degrading them by refusing them the autonomy to make their own decisions.
No matter what your feelings on the matter, sweeping a floor only has a value up to some hourly rate that depends on a particular business' circumstances. Beyond this point, sweeping will be substituted with technology or simply forgone.
Also, there isn't much empirical evidence to support your claim about a race to the bottom (note: almost all jobs already pay over federal minimum and yet there is no "race to the bottom"). It's also funny you would cite tech workers--some of the highest paid people in the world--as your example of a "race to the bottom". Yes collusion can happen between companies--no one thinks markets are perfect--but markets punish this type of behavior over longer time frames. If Google and Apple are colluding and pushing down wages, some other entrepreneur has an opportunity to pay their workers more and steal their talent. This is slightly complicated by the fact that competition is often constrained in other ways (occupational licensing, regulations, intellectual property, etc.), but these are artificial barriers (i.e., government) to market competition.
Most chronically homeless people suffer from mental illness or substance abuse, but there's a distinction between the long term homeless and those who are temporarily down on their luck (like one woman mentioned in the article, who moved to Seattle for employment reasons and was thrown off when her state based certification didn't transfer).
I don't think it was Amazon's intent to reach out to individuals whose present condition included serious untreated mental illnesses.
Your theory is essentially Marxist (capital colluding to hold down the workers), and like all Marxist theories, falls apart when applied to reality.
Saying things like the homeless 'serve a function' for corporations to 'keep down wages and agitation' only makes a lick of sense if you see 'corporations' as one giant agent which rules society, and not merely businesses which survive via trade.
>like all Marxist theories, falls apart when applied to reality.
Some but not all. This one certainly doesn't fall apart.
>Saying things like the homeless 'serve a function' for corporations to 'keep down wages and agitation' only makes a lick of sense if you see 'corporations' as one giant agent which rules society
Cohesive power blocs often come together to act as as a unified political agent when they have shared interests.
Two good institutional examples of corporate power blocs in the US are Cato and the AEI. Many of their members compete for market share, but they joined forces to gain political representation together to have their interests as a whole represented.
Actually according to Marxism capital doesn't have to collude, there need not be any conspiracy, holding down the workers is the natural conclusion of capitalism.
This is like saying systematic discrimination doesn't exist because the hegemonic group does not have a single organization deliberately applying discrimination.
>Giving jobs to the jobless and homes to the homeless is exactly as straightforward as it looks.
Can I live in your simple universe?
Speaking as someone who was homeless for ~5 years, I could have told Amazon exactly how this would play out. The vast majority of the homeless are drunks, addicts, mentally ill, and fantastically stupid (who think they're geniuses). What do you think is going to happen when you hire such people?
Yes, yes, very good. But seriously, if you are paying your employees below minimum wage, then one of the following must be true:
-Your business doesn't make enough income, possibly a sign of a bad business model; or
-You are intentionally paying your employees as little as possible, which I see as profiteering.
If they work N hours and receive fewer than $7.25 * N, then the employer is required to make up the difference. I understand there are some accounting tricks involving another $2.13/hour floor and tips, but regardless of those tricks they can't be paid less than minimum wage without the restaurant violating labor law.
To make the term "minimum wage" useful, it must have a bunch of qualifier like "minimum wage as set by the law for a set amount of work hours, under the condition that they don't earn other wages". Otherwise special conditions like symbolic wages will ruin the term for everyone.
No, the main point is to get labour at a lower total cost, even though you can't predict very well how much you'll need.
Sign up to a call center, and they'll say "we'll answer your calls and bill you per call. If you want to do it yourself you can, but in order to cover the peaks you'll have to hire so many people that most are idle during the troughs... we know how to plan this and scale and things and more things, and you don't so why don't you just let us do it?"
Getting around irritating minimum wages and other laws is a fringe benefit. Scaling the headcount is the big one.
So how about using prison labour, where people are paid 10 cents(or however much, it's an example not a solid number) an hour? The only difference between homeless people and prisoners in that case is that homeless people are not in prison. But the job they do serves the same purpose - offers them something to break the cycle of what they are doing currently.
Right, that's exactly a paradox/error that the Copenhagen critique elucidates: two groups have (basically) the same effect on the world (providing the opportunity to have regular work to do in exchange for money), but you only rebuke one of them, since they're doing it for profit.
I can think of logical reasons to justify distinguishing them, but I rarely see such reasons made explicit. (One reason might be that there's a greater incentive to cut corners on worker treatment when you're for profit rather then just doing it out of the goodness of your heart, but that would justify at most tighter oversight, not moral condemnation of doing the thing at all, as we normally see.)
> two groups have (basically) the same effect on the world
There's 'basically' and then there's 'basically'. In the article, it suggests that Amazon misled the potential employees with "temporary-to-permanent" when they were actually "seasonal" jobs. The article's main interviewee then talks about how that made things worse for the people she knew.
A for-profit has a lot of motive for misleading people or withholding information. A non-profit has much less motive - if the point of the non-profit is to help demographic X, then lying to demographic X (or engaging in other activity to screw them, intentionally or unintentionally) is much less likely to happen.
The effect on the world is a lot more complex than "X people got N jobs at $rate".
>A for-profit has a lot of motive for misleading people or withholding information. A non-profit has much less motive - if the point of the non-profit is to help demographic X, then lying to demographic X (or engaging in other activity to screw them, intentionally or unintentionally) is much less likely to happen.
Yes, it sounded like you were explaining it away, to turn it back into "X people got N jobs at $rate". For example, what entity is going to do this "tighter oversight" that you suggest? How is that going to work? And so until this entity that does tighter oversight comes along, why should companies get a pass on screwing their workers?
"Well, I would condemn them screwing their employees, but since there's no official entity to watch them, we can't make a moral judgement"?
>Right, that's exactly a paradox/error that the Copenhagen critique elucidates: two groups have (basically) the same effect on the world (providing the opportunity to have regular work to do in exchange for money), but you only rebuke one of them, since they're doing it for profit.
I see it as very different. The Copenhagen issue is that if you try to help fix a problem, you are now responsible for the parts you didn't fix. Imagine if you fix a bad code base to remove half of the significant defects, and are now blamed for the other half that already existed because your upgrade didn't fix them.
What is happening in this particular case is different. It is judging entities based not only on their actions or effects, but also their intents. This is quite common, for example intent can be the difference between murder and self defense.
First, why do you describe offering someone a job as exploitation? It's totally not. Giving someone an option they didn't have before makes them strictly better off. They can choose between it and their other options. Working a job when you didn't have one before tends to make a person better off - either way it's up to them, and either way, it's one more option they didn't have before.
Second, just by interacting with the situation, you don't become responsible for it. The homeless' situation is not a potential employer's responsibility any more than it is yours personally or any other person's on the world. What are you doing about the homeless problem? Employers who go out of their way to offer homeless jobs, and to indicate that they won't discriminate based on that background, are actually giving them the opportunity to improve their lives. By comparison, most people involved in the thread will have done nothing at all to help homeless or give them opportunities, despite criticizing employers who do.
(Please read the link above; it offers a useful discussion of the issues.)
>Giving someone an option they didn't have before makes them strictly better off. They can choose between it and their other options.
Is this always true? Imagine a third world country where children die from lack of food, clean water, and medical care. Now imagine a group that goes in and offers to exploit the children (I'll leave how up to your imagination) in exchange for meeting all their basic needs. Is this group making the children better off... and conversely, are anyone fighting for laws to ban the actions of this group working to make the children worse off? Almost every single person I've brought this up to will say yes for at least some forms of exploitation. If you go with child labor, you'll get a decent number on either side, but if you go with other forms of exploitation the rate who say that offering the choice is harmful jumps to basically 100%. (This is one of those questions that, if I ever make it rich, I would fund official research into, but until then I will admit this is based off of my person anecdotes.)
All that being said, I agree that you shouldn't be responsible for the underlying situation. Even if you are wrong for offering a given bad choice, you are not at fault for the underlying situation.
Couldn't reply to the child post, so I'm putting it here:
Yes it is true that if a company helps but does not entirely solve a problem, they are not obligated to stick it out. But in this case it may be that they are not helping by offering homeless people seasonal jobs. The fallacy here is that homeless people have a choice: if I were in a desperate situation, then I would take any job on offer. I.e. by being given the option the decision has essentially been made for for me, and whilst I may be better off in the immediate future, that doesn't mean it will last (and it could even be worse in the long term), and whilst I could decline the offer, and wait for something more stable, my circumstances are sufficient motivation for me not to do that.
A cynical person might even posit that by explicitly not doing enough to bring people out of homelessness, Amazon succeeds in maintaining a pool of willing and cheap seasonal labour.
Sure: Minimum wage is too high and the market should set it, not government.
BTW, when I started working minimum wage was under $4/hr. Within four years I was making over 6 times that much. Two years later, over twelve times. Another four years had me at 25 times minimum wage.
The secret? I worked and studied hard. I took nothing for granted and $4 per hour was not enough to be comfortable.
I don't understand. Are there any philosophers saying that the problem of homelessness is Amazon's fault? Because it seems to me that the people who say that that's what philosophers are saying, simply say that to ridicule a position they don't fully understand so they don't have to listen to what the philosophers actually have to say. I mean, if philosophers have been studying the issue for ages, maybe, just maybe they have a point that's at least worth listening to? Because I do know one thing: no one is blaming Amazon for creating the problem of homelessness.
As noble as the attempt may be, you still have to use your head - if you're really trying to help people. There's a tendency to say, hey its something, its better than nothing.. Not necessarily.
Not an expert but it makes perfect sense that seasonal jobs are not well suited for homeless people, for the reasons the article mentions - they don't have schedule flexibility (when they can get a bed!) others have, not to mention that they really need permanent jobs. Even more so than another type of seasonal worker - the high school or college student living at home.
Good for Amazon if they're doing it for the right reasons, but you still need to do it right. There's more at stake than the typical corporate pet project. These people are (sadly) incredibly vulnerable. Taking swipes at it and failing can have serious consequences.
I trade my tech knowledge for knowledge with other things. For example, my girlfriend's dad knows relatively little about computers, but he knows an enormous amount about home improvement and car maintenance. I fix his occasional computer issues, he can walk me through anything that happens to my poor beat-up Civic.
This applies to pretty much everything - friends help friends with stuff. But there's a pretty clear tit-for-tat exchange going on. If I have a problem, I expect you to give me advice, too. So, in this way, I treat tech knowledge as being exactly the same as electrician knowledge, mechanical knowledge, and medical knowledge. If you want access to my knowledge, you have to give me access to your knowledge (and to your own network if you don't have any).
I haven't had the problem with poor people, or family. I do tell them, there's no guarantee, and it's most likely something you did, and you should learn more about computing before you even think about opening up the command line, or even use the time machine."
I have had wealthy individuals act like they are doing me a favor because I need to find the virus/malware one of their clones dowloaded from some porn site. I always give them a quote. They send me home, and then the wife calls after hubby gets to the permently blue screen, or the wheel never stops spinning.
Anecdotally speaking, in the past month or so I've seen people ask doctor friends about their maladies, lawyers asked to look at contracts and accountants asked about mortgages - all off the clock and without pay. It's not just a tech thing.
I actually kinda wish I did tech support for my grandmother. She's a nurse and I occasionally call her for things. However, my father used to be a sysadmin and seems to have things set up such that she doesn't need help with anything.
I don't know if it still "a thing" or not, but I try to help friends and such who may be going thru rough times or whatever, and I enjoy fixing broken things that people have given up on.
Maybe it reminds me of myself and the help I've received after people gave up on me.
But like I said, the fallout of it often reminds me of the parent post.
That is not at all the case. If you try to solve a problem but only do it partially, no one blames you. If you try to make a profit by benefitting from a problem, then you have some moral responsibility, maybe not for the problem's existence, but for the people you benefit from. So the claim isn't involvement => blame, but profit => increased responsibility, which doesn't seem so outrageous.
The issue of mutually beneficial exploitation is a big problem in ethics[1]. People who say it's OK, subscribe to what's known as the "non-worseness claim", but many don't. That post you linked to is a shallow, uneducated piece that completely ignores the vast discussion on the topic in ethics literature[2].
Another thing is that even with the most generous interpretation, and even if you do subscribe to the non-worseness claim and find it ethically positive, in most such mutually-beneficial exploitation cases, no one is really trying to solve the problem, just to make the best of a bad situation. That is not bad per se, but let's not pretend Amazon is "trying to solve" the problem of homelessness.
[2]: And that is a charitable description. It reads like an article about the motion of celestial bodies written today by someone who is completely unaware that physics has been an active discipline for centuries, and may have a thing or two to say about the subject. I don't expect everyone to be an expert on everything, and it's great that non-experts write about matters they've only recently been introduced to (as this can help others), but I find it hair-pullingly frustrating when people write about something by trying to deduce from first-principles without so much as googling to see if perhaps there has been some serious treatment of the subject before. It is doubly frustrating when it is those ignorant (though perhaps well-intentioned) articles are the ones that get referenced and discussed. It's like those texts actively erase knowledge.
Could you be any more conceited and self-satisfied?
All you do is say that the poster is uneducated, but have made zero attempt in educating him, other readers or advancing any argument against what was posted.
so tell me, if i was in a desert and somebody is really thirsty, why is it unethical for me to sell him some water?
> Could you be any more conceited and self-satisfied?
You mean like people who believe they can solve any problem by just deducing the solution from first-principles without even trying to find some prior art (I know the author of that post didn't, because it took me all of five minutes of googling to find plenty of it)? Or people who believe there are easy answers because they are just unaware of the the complexities of the world and so maintain a simple, solvable, model of it in their minds? Or worse, people who justify their views with the naturalistic fallacy and say, "well, this is how the world works; we can't change it so we might as well make the best of a shitty situation"? (as long as they don't get the short end of the stick, of course)
And you need to understand that people who write articles like that are being dismissive towards real people who have actually dedicated their lives to studying social problems (or debating questions of ethics).
> but have made zero attempt in educating him
Because the issue is very, very complex. I have provided a link that points to where to get started when approaching this difficult topic.
> if i was in a desert and somebody is really thirsty, why is it unethical for me to sell him some water?
The reason you're bringing this up is because you think that the analogy is apt, but I'm not so sure. There are some ways to approach this (which are far from comprehensive).
First, you need to explain the situation. How much water do you have? Let's suppose you have a supply for a million people. I would say that in that situation it may be ethical for you to sell that man some water, but if you do (rather than just give him the water), you now have a certain obligation towards him. For example, to make sure that he has enough water. Another question is why is that man in the desert in the first place? Could you have possibly contributed to his being there, or did not do enough to stop him? Suppose that the reason he is there is because he got lost, and he got lost because the map of the area is wrong. And it's not just him, but many people get lost because of that map, and that is precisely why you've decided to get a water tanker and set up shop in the desert. Now, it may not have been in your power to change the map, but if you had made the same effort into getting the map fixed as into setting up your water stand, there may have been a good chance that it would have been fixed. So now this puts you in a different role: you're not trying to help solve the desert problem, but you're benefiting from it not being fixed, and while you may not have been able to fix it yourself, you could have helped but you didn't. If that is the case, I think that you have quite a strong moral responsibility towards those poor souls. You are not to blame for their problem, you certainly didn't make the desert or the wrong map, but you're not really trying to fix the cause and you are benefiting from it. In that case, I would say that at the very least you have the moral responsibility to sell the water at a very decent price, and to make sure all your lost customers make it out alive.
My point is that mutually-beneficial exploitation has been known to be a very hard problem for a long time, and so we try to approach it on a case-by-case basis, and make sure we try to understand the full ethical picture. Simplified analogies don't help -- they remove nuance from a very nuanced question.
If by nuaced you mean introducing external factors to cloud the problem.
At the end of the day, if it's 'mutually beneficial', how could it possibly be 'exploitation'?
It's other people's job to make sure their map is good. If they had failed in doing so, i'm pretty sure they would rather have, in your contrived example, a dude with a tank of water selling them overpriced H2O than to die in a desert.
> If by nuaced you mean introducing external factors to cloud the problem.
No, by "nuanced" I mean that in a system with such strong interaction between the components (anything can affect anything) there are always what you may consider "external" factors. People cloud the problem by artificially simplifying it when they don't consider the whole picture (usually just to make their decision easier).
> At the end of the day, if it's 'mutually beneficial', how could it possibly be 'exploitation'?
Wonderful question. Good thing that philosophers have debated it for many years, now. Read the link I provided for an intro to the discussion.
> It's other people's job to make sure their map is good.
That is one possible ethical position, but if you explore how it was constructed, you would see it is far from trivial. To help you along, consider the axioms that have led you to the conclusion and how you came up with them.
But consider a simple example: suppose that you notice some oil-spill on the sidewalk that you manage avoid stepping into. Do you have zero responsibility to warn others? If so why? If not, why not?
> i'm pretty sure they would rather have, in your contrived example, a dude with a tank of water selling them overpriced H2O than to die in a desert.
Sure, but that alone is not sufficient to absolve the dude from any moral obligation. Consider the case where the dude shoots your leg off and then offers to sell you a tourniquet. You would rather buy it than die, but that doesn't make him ethically right. This is a completely different question from that of mutually-beneficial exploitation, but it just shows why offering you a better choice is not enough. It also hints to why many consider mutually beneficial exploitation to be wrong (or at least to impose added moral responsibility on the exploiter): sometimes to consider ethics, it's not enough to consider two choices: sell you the tourniquet or not, but also other choices, such as not shooting you in the first place.
In my example of the man in the desert, the two choices are not just selling you water or not, but quite a few: helping ensure that the map is right (say, by writing a letter to the mapmaker), giving you the water for free, selling you the water for a low price, selling you the water for a fair price (for some definition of fair), selling you the water for a high price. Each of these many choices has their own ethical value (things don't have to be binary). But understand this: the claim isn't that because you can always choose an even more ethical choice then a less-ethical one is "wrong", but that if you benefit by making a particular choice rather than a "better" one, that benefit may impose added moral responsibility on you.
The reason nothing improves in government IT. If you try to fix the problem, you are now responsible for all parts not fixed. If you do nothing, then someone long gone is still to blame.
I'm not seeing Amazon "criticized for offering jobs". Instead I see a list of very specific issues that arose from this arrangement:
1. Amazon may (or may not) have promised that the jobs were temporary-to-permanent rather than just seasonal.
2. Amazon did not have a clear feedback mechanism so that they could improve the program.
3. It sounds like Amazon only gave a week's notice to put this job fair together (something usually takes a month).
From the article:
> He said it’s normal for companies to face these questions when they first hire homeless workers. But he said what counts is that they keep trying and learning.
I would hardly expect to find that tidbit in an article that was attempting to lay the entire blame for the worldwide problem of homelessness at the feet of Amazon... for hiring a few homeless people from Seattle.
The problem with companies getting involved in social issues is that social issues take a degree of tact, planning and prior-research. You can't just wade in and play with peoples lives.
Good on them for trying - and I hope they don't feel burned by it - but there's a reason public entities and charities are better placed to addressed these kinds of problems, even if they're not well resourced for it. Hopefully they'll continue to refine how they approach it.
The article isn't that bad, although it has a negative tone against Amazon when they are really trying to do a good thing. Some of the comments are blaming Amazon, and in the past I have seen a lot of hate on Amazon and other companies that employ a lot of unskilled workers. Hell there was an article just the other day that blamed a lot of Silicon Valley companies like Uber for poverty, which makes no sense at all.
I think the hate on Amazon is fairly justified. Working conditions for their fulfillment workers suck and there's a pretty poisoned atmosphere (Amazon Poland for example).
Thank you for this. I don't understand why other posts are so heavily weighted with arguments of "Oh, so they didn't solve the homeless problem, so now the whole problem is their fault?" Amazon either took advantage of the scheme, or rushed in - maybe even with the best of intentions - without thinking through or committing to what was actually required to make it a success.
> It's the failure to follow through and provide the promised stability.
What evidence is there of failure to follow through? Temporary-to-permanent does not mean someone is guaranteed a permanent position, it means they have a chance at it. The permanent positions might be relatively small in number, and highly competitive, so some workers will not get it. Who is most likely to be interviewed by a newspaper and have an axe to grind?
The article would be more informative if it shared data about what percentage of workers were hired as temps, and how many full time positions were expected to be hired afterward, and how many of the homeless hired as temps made it into full time, and so on. Without that information, the article is just an anecdote from a person or two.
The nature of temp work is that it's not permanent, and no one hired into a temp job should have the disillusion that they will definitely get a permanent one. Temporary-to-permanent work means that there's a chance to stay on if you're good - you're not definitely going to get fired, nor do you definitely get to stay.
Agreed. It sounds like the homeless shelters might need to do more to help people who have shift-work. It might not be ideal to work at night, but it certainly beats living on the street and begging IMHO.
Amazon is not doing this for the benefit of homeless folks. They're in it for the cheap labor and tax breaks, which is fine except that the social safety net in the USA is full of holes.
No one negotiated to keep homeless shelters open so that the workers could actually DO nigh-shift work. No one counseled the workers on the financial implications of "seasonal work" and how small of a grain of salt to take when a company says the temp work "might" become permanent.
I don't blame Amazon, but I do think they were at least naive about the scope of the project and the chance for success given the circumstances of homeless people.
I don't think that's the case - the article clearly points out how enthusiastic the people involved were at first. To me it feels more focused on a lack of proper planning by Amazon for just how hard it is. Things like most of the work being night-shifts is definitely indicative of a lack of prior-research.
Amazon doesn't offer jobs to help people. It offers jobs because it sees an opportunity to make money. Homeless people are probably cheaper than other workers, and are probably just as productive, thanks to Amazon's discipline enforcing measures.[1]
What it were proved that Amazon was offering jobs to the homeless at the exact same rate and conditions that it offered to all its seasonal workers, thereby not treating the homeless any worse than others.
Then what?
To me it would indicate that the motivation behind proposing jobs for homeless, which is usually a barrier to other employers, would be a benevolent one.
They basically said they will not bias against employment based on your housing situation. All things being equal, this is a good thing.
> What it were proved that Amazon was offering jobs to the homeless at the exact same rate and conditions that it offered to all its seasonal workers, thereby not treating the homeless any worse than others
The reason Amazon hires any worker, homeless or not, is to extract a profit from their work. It's entirely possible that it offers the exact same conditions as other workers, but to describe it as benevolence is naive at best.
Amazon has a huge surge in orders during the christmas period, and it struggles to find enough workers to keep up with demand. This article makes it clear that this was a scheme aimed at coping with the seasonal surge. It has nothing to do with Amazon wanting to see homeless people better off.
Why are they mutually exclusive? If I can help get employees for my seasonal surge and HELP homeless people then that's a double win for me.
The article is only arguing that Amazon's part time job though wasn't as life-changing as intentioned. It was only seasonal (which they knew) and the hours didn't end up helping the staff. Now you can argue that Amazon doesn't care because it didn't accommodate the homeless workers with day jobs instead of night jobs.
They don't have to be mutually exclusive, but it is important to understand what the primary motivation for an arrangement is, because it helps you predict how the arrangement is likely to change with changing conditions.
If the primary motivation was to help the seasonal employees, the program might have looked significantly different.
Amazon is being shown in a very bad light in this article, but it seems fair to say that both Amazon and the seasonal employees went into this arrangement with unrealistic expectations.
HOWEVER, One side clearly has much more power than the other, and when you wield enormous power and fail to provide help that is clearly needed and you are clearly capable of providing, I think it is easy to predict that you will not come out looking good.
You have to wonder whether Amazon knew things could turn out this way when they approached the YWCA.
> The reason Amazon hires any worker, homeless or not, is to extract a profit from their work.
This arguments are getting ridiculous. Why is it always the employers exploiting the employees? Why not the other way round? The way I see it, if the people could generate more value self-employed, they would do it! The only reason they take jobs is because they can, gasp, exploit the employer by producing more value than they would otherwise, and getting paid more!
> The way I see it, if the people could generate more value self-employed, they would do it!
Nah. The "Losers" in MacLeod's hierarchy are explicitly choosing to leave extractable value on the table (this being the thing they're "losing") in exchange for being allowed to slack. Most people do not have the willpower to be entrepreneurs; in fact, much the opposite—most people want a job that requires as little willpower of them as possible.
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." — Adam Smith
Of course, he also said:
"No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged."
But it is work, to those who would otherwise not have any. It's very easy to say "you shouldn't work there, that job is terrible" when you're not the one spending nights in a park.
I think that what you are saying is that these people are so miserable that they have no other choice but to take the rare jobs that they are offered, no matter how terrible. If so, I totally agree with you.
I would just like to take a moment to wonder at the shitness of our world where the best we can do for those who have been deprived of everything is to ask them to break their backs so the extravagantly wealthy can make a bit more money.
> ask them to break their backs so the extravagantly wealthy can make a bit more money
That's a very hostile way to describe working a warehouse job.
Offering someone a job is not asking them to break their back. Working for an employer has nothing to do with the extravagantly wealthy. All companies need employees, and companies are valuable because they serve their customers. You could equally say "break their back so random Internet consumers get their products", or "Burger King / WalMart employees break their backs so you get a cheap cheeseburger / grocery product".
Working a job tends to make people better off, and offering someone a job they didn't have before is giving them a new option. We can wish for a world where even better jobs were available, but wishing doesn't make it so. It's strictly better for the homeless to have one more job opportunity, than one fewer.
You can wish there were even better opportunities, but are you prepared to provide them yourself? Or is this your position: "I'm not going to do anything about it myself, but I'm going to criticize those who do something positive, even if it's just providing a low value opportunity. Someone should provide a better opportunity than that, but I won't be the one to do it."
> Working for an employer has nothing to do with the extravagantly wealthy.
You're very right about this, it was wrong of me to describe the purpose of the operation as being that of making someone rich. The purpose is to maximise profits for the employer – which can lead to extreme wealth or poverty, depending on your success. Besides, in order to appreciate how shit a situation is for someone it is irrelevant to know whether someone else is profiting from it. So thanks for pointing that out.
> Working a job tends to make people better off [...] It's strictly better for the homeless to have one more job opportunity, than one fewer.
I think this is wishful thinking. The article actually points out that this is not true: getting this job actually made the situation worse for a lot of them.
> but are you prepared to provide them yourself?
As a pauper myself, I am not. I don't have the resources to do so.
> to criticize those who do something positive
As I tried to show before, good intentions was not what motivated Amazon to offer jobs to these people. Also, leaving someone worse off than before is not what I would call a positive outcome. So this cannot be my position.
> By demonizing companies that offer jobs to poor people or the homeless,
I definitely did not mean to demonise Amazon. I pointed out in my last comment that this was a feature of our world, not a feature of a particular company. That's the saddest thing of this whole story: Amazon acted completely rationally, and it's easy to see how it almost had no choice but to use up these homeless people and then throw them away. Not because it's evil, but because that's what's required of it as a company. If Amazon stops churning out profits, it won't be a company for much longer.
> you're committing the fallacy called the Copenhagen Interpreation of Ethics.
Nitpick: what you call the Copenhagen Interpreation of Ethics is not a fallacy, there's no logic involved here since it relates to people's moral values. It's a phenomenon at best. But once again, the point was not to say that Amazon is evil; the point is to say this world is broken.
> I think that what you are saying is that these people are so miserable that they have no other choice but to take the rare jobs that they are offered, no matter how terrible. If so, I totally agree with you.
I would say they're in such need as they would take any job offered them, misery notwithstanding, but you're 80% with me yes.
> I would just like to take a moment to wonder at the shitness of our world where the best we can do for those who have been deprived of everything is to ask them to break their backs so the extravagantly wealthy can make a bit more money.
I kind of agree with you here. I don't think Bezos is up in his office masturbating vigorously to camera footage of homeless people walking into Amazon warehouses to work. He's not hiring them because he wants to make money, in all likelihood most of them will need a fair bit more training than regular blue collar workers who are between jobs or people looking to earn some extra money, and I'm also willing to bet that a homeless person would be fairly less reliable in terms of showing up for their shifts on time if only for the fact that they literally have nothing including a car. Amazon probably does want to help, and they want to enough that they're willing to overlook the problems that come with hiring homeless people.
Now we can argue all day about how Amazon could afford to put those people in 5 star hotels for the entire Christmas season and it probably wouldn't hurt them, but that's not the point. They're a company, not a charity. They don't need to hire these people at all if they don't want to (and if they didn't, no one would even be arguing about this in the first place) so forgive me if I'm not willing to throw them under the bus for at least trying to help.
> so forgive me if I'm not willing to throw them under the bus for at least trying to help
It's not Amazon I want to throw under the bus. They did what any rational player would do in their situation. What I want to throw under the bus is the situation itself, aka, how we organise our world.
Totally. Leave it to socialists to attack someone who had actually tried to help the poor.
The worst thing about homelessness is said to be that some people fall into poverty over bad luck, and if they would only get a break they can pull out. So that's what amazon did - have them a brake.
Even with a seasonal job, I'm sure some of them pulled themselves out of poverty.
Definitely a trend that socialists talk the most about helping people but conservatives are the ones you'll more likely find getting their hands dirty.
If I had to guess it's because socialists believe that everyone should bear the cost of helping the financially disadvantaged, whereas conservatives believe that its up to each individual to decide of they should help someone (beyond such things as emergency/military services which are socialist but have been enshrined into our view of government).
So a socialist who wants to help the homeless will spend their time fighting the government to fund to social services.
Does political action count as "getting your hands dirty"? Well I'm not one to decide.
Depends. FB activism I would argue is not getting your hands dirty, but more involved actions count, IMO.
Edit: This is actually a really interesting topic and I didn't mean offense by my original post. So it's sad to see people downvoting/unwilling to talk about these things.
Not a socialist thing per se[1], but a common, general mentality that the taint of the profit motive counts very strongly against even a large amount of good effects in the moral calculus.
[1] Edit: Let's be fair -- there are probably a lot of intelligent socialists who have a more nuanced understanding of the impacts of these programs and the dynamics at play.
It'd be tough to find good data on the topic, but the "fuck you, got mine" mentality seems to be sprinkled around fairly randomly among privileged people. Political leanings are often inherited and don't seem to correlate with that attitude.
> conservatives are the ones you'll more likely find getting their hands dirty.
> IDK why.
I could venture a guess that many very religious people are on the conservative side of the spectrum, and their religion compels them to help others. Though in most cases, "helping others" means "attempting to convert them to your religion." And many times you can just replace "religion" with "cult" and it comes out about the same (e.g. Scientology has outreach programs, though I think that's more for converting survivors of disasters than helping the homeless).
That's not a trend I've noticed. Once you take into account donations to churches, conservatives are less likely to give time or money for charitable work.
>Definitely a trend that socialists talk the most about helping people but conservatives are the ones you'll more likely find getting their hands dirty.
This is an incredibly dubious statement. 99% of americans are literally afraid to touch a homeless person, it's pretty pathetic.
