Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/08/15/resistance-is-futile-2.html
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Technically speaking, if they pay them enough for said “positive tweets” then maybe after quadrupling their salaries it will make the conditions worth while?
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So in order to get their pay supplemented we need to tweet about poor conditions? How many tweets do I need to generate a living wage for a warehouse worker?
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Our family dropped Prime and only uses Amazon when all other resources come up empty.
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To be fair, for some people it is natural to want to cling to the belief that they have a decent job: if they write these positive things it doesn’t encessarily mean they are being forced to shill. I remember as an 18-yr-old travelling encyclopedia salesman for Grolier in about 1990, working on commission only as a broke college student in the summer, that once in a while a homeowner whose door I would knock on would say they felt terrible for the way I was being made to work, and I very defensively told them everything was great. (They were right of course, it was shitty and abusive.)
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Much respect. I dropped Prime in protest last year and because of my numerous weaknesses a few months later re-activated it.
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Okay, here’s the thing though… what if the conditions genuinely are decent, at least in some locations? I’m just saying that maybe they’re being truthful, but we’re not open to it because it doesn’t fit the narrative.
Just to be clear, I know nothing about any of this, other than the general “Amazon treats employees like shit” rhetoric that everyone else has heard. Could be true for all I know, I just think we should give them a chance.
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See, that reads to me like he is taking Amazon’s 30 pieces of silver and using irony to sabotage their hamfisted propaganda campaign from within. I mean, who would literally tweet “everything is fine” if they actually wanted to defend labor conditions in the smile mines?
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I read something that suggested they weren’t necessarily warehouse floor workers (when they weren’t being paid to tweet). So their salaries are probably higher to start with…
Conditions and salaries working in warehouses are going to be pretty consistent, though. Of course, not everyone is working in the warehouse…
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take away: its cheaper to pay a few employees to cheerlead for you, than to improve compensation and conditions for every worker.
let me translate for you: Amazon is totally willing to treat people like shit for money.
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I completely believe that this is true, but my brain is having significant issues accepting that such a thing was a real job less than 30 years ago. This timeline has escalated rapidly!
So true.
Seems like one of those things people only say when the opposite is true. For instance, I imagine police hear this often from the person answering the door when they’re called on a domestic abuse complaint.
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I had a boss who said that any employee who is worth his salt believes they are not getting paid enough.
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Well, “everything is fine” is a quote from the message before. So, it may just be a way to directly answer to that message.
ClutchLinkey wrote, re selling encyclopedias door-to-door: “having significant issues accepting that such a thing was a real job less than 30 years ago”.
I know, right? The shittiest thing about it was that the sales program we followed was aimed at families with little kids, you were supposed to guilt them into ensuring a literate future for their kids when they were old enough, by shelling out $2k (Canadian) for an already-outdated set of encyclopedias (the Encyclopedia Americana) along with some educational stuff aimed more at little kids. And they loaded 4 of us into a car and drove off for a couple of weeks at a time, staying in shitty motels, dropping each of us off in a little town and telling us to look for the houses with kids’ toys on the front lawn and to knock on the door. They paid for the motel (or rather it came out of our team manager’s commission), and we paid for our own meals, which we had to eat as a team , no buying groceries and fending for yourself except when you were out in the field. It doesn’t seem real. I sold 4 sets in two two-week trips before giving up, and earned 4 x $275 if I remember correctly.
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Amazon also pays depressed employees to say that their depression has nothing to do with their job.
It also apparently pays them to use an enterprise-oriented social media coordination platform to tweet from.
And they can’t even be bothered to make new accounts for each of their new ambassadors (which is sad, because it’s not like burner Twitter accounts are hard to make), they just change the username and hope nobody notices.
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Classic Kids In The Hall to go along with this:
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I have a conscience that says that the billionaire class are way out of step with reality and need to start paying their fair share. Oh, wait, that’s Bernie’s voice I’m hearing in my head!
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It’s still propaganda, though. Propaganda isn’t just defined as being lies to persuade and convince. It can include parts of the truth, or even entire truths. Fact is that incredibly terrible working conditions exists in many Amazon warehouses, and even if some are okay, we should not (as a society) be okay with any sort of exploitation, ever.
They are spinning a narrative that is aimed at hiding abuse, which is a much worse problem than ignoring the cases where the labor conditions are okay. Because that means that they are still trying to cover something up.
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