So this article has been going around this weekend. Gawker had a lot of articles about Amazon’s workers conditions for the past few years. It is also how most tech companies work: commitment must be way up there. All of that is not new.
- It’s not wrong to work your ass off for a company.
- It’s not wrong for a company to use data to get the best of its employees.
What is wrong is having people being deeply dependent on a salary to have a decent life. Yeah, I question that. There’s too much wealth on this planet or in the US to just close my eyes and be like “this is fine just fuck me up”. 1% owning 99%, don’t forget. Never forget, that’s key in changing how society functions.
Like I tweeted Quality of Life shouldn’t be indexed to work. The good news is we can afford it, the bad news is most people can’t grasp that it’s possible. Jeff Bezos “made” $7B in 45 minutes when Amazon stocks jumped a hundred bucks a few days ago. Do you know how many things you can solve with seven billion dollars? Let me help you: a fucking shit ton.
If those Amazon people didn’t have to think about paying rent –being on average half of what we make right?-, they still would work as hard –I think even harder- but they would be freed from pressure if something happens in their lives it wouldn’t be a big deal, just a change of pace. And maybe they would come back to the hard tech world once they feel like they can again.
Failure costs would be at a minimum instead of a maximum: bankruptcy, guilt, feelings of being worthless etc. All that, gone. Maybe that job wasn’t for you. Maybe you just needed a break!
We need to stop putting all the pressure on people, that’s why people break not because they work hard. We have wealth and we need to redistribute far more efficiently than the way we’re doing it today which is to sprinkle some money on the poor, allow stupid amounts of taxes to not be collected from a stupidly wealthy crowd and ask the middle to do everything more and harder. That’s imploding right now in our faces.
One more thing: Amazon is huge but Amazon is not profitable. You can’t say that you’re that successful if you’re continuously in the red for 15 years. So maybe if pressure comes off people shoulders they will start working on things that are actually making a nice profit for the retail giant and make customers happier. Just sayin’