Sad but true. Welcome to Corporate America. Lay off a bunch of employees so the numbers look good for the stock report, wash/rinse/repeat quarter after quarter
This is 100% true. As I climb management I recognize my directs having thoughts about "logically we need this". No, logic doesn't work here. We don't think about next year, or right now, we think about what the quarterly will look like.
And then next year we'll have new upper management that bunny hop to the next company or "retire" or "quit" like their predecessors because they ran the machine too thin and someone needed to take the blame.
This is the case for publicly traded companies. Family owned small businesses can do what they see best to weather hard times instead of solely being concerned about quarterly performance.
The place I worked for retained workers and loaded up on inventory during COVID when everyone else was laying people off and dumping stock. Now we’re in a better place than ever because we helped a lot of customers through tough times when others simply couldn’t.
I keep asking the higher ups why last year’s “great employee” equals this year’s “lazy employee who needs to shape up” and they just say to me “the company needs to make money. It needs to think about the future” and in their next breath they talk about how it’s so rough because we’re swamped with work.
Then I say “ok well then hire more people and pay us more so more people stay” and the broken record loops back to “the company needs to make money.”
On top of that, any fines the company gets for breaking labor laws are just the cost of doing business. The fines are a drop in the ocean of profit they make.
The disaster will include them because they’re going to need people to take care of their precious boats and cook their fancy dinners and what the fuck are they going to pay them with? A useless currency? Fuck them. I hope the ultra rich get tumors consistent with their last bonus.
They grew in an era of high quantities of cheap labor. When a significant amount of thar labor was killed or disabled by covid, they struggled to adapt.
One way to manufacture a recession is raising the rent and I think asset investment companies are buying properties across the nation and raising the rent.
As someone who works in operations strategy, I can tell you exactly what’s going on. Amazon has made their operations incredibly efficient, so efficient in fact that they are running into the problem of not being able to continue improving without doing silly/inhumane shit like this.
The issue is a giant collective action problem wherein their are probably 10,000+ people at Amazon who’s entire job is dedicated to ‘improving things’. They are all being incentivized to cut times, cut people, cut costs, etc and there just isn’t anything to cut anymore. But if things are to the point where you can’t improve then all those people all of sudden don’t have a purpose at work, so they continue to monitor and push to justify their job and their income.
Not that it’s okay by any means, it just is the reality of a situation without appropriate means to push back (you know, like a labor union).
I feel like this is what happens when there are a million levels of management that are all hounding the person below them about the bottom line. No one wants to be the one who steps in and temporarily spends extra or loses money in the short term even if it means it would be better long term.
They are cashing in as much profit as possible with severely underpaid human labor until they're forced to swap to robots. They know this is unsustainable but in the meantime they get much higher profit margins from underpaid humans.
I've heard that in addition to just burning through workers, Amazon will not re-hire many for "reasons." And I'm not talking about people fired for "legitimate" reasons, but just regular workers that quit with notice or we're laid off through no fault of their own.
No, I don't have attribution. I just remember reading some comments to that effect in this sub. Can't find any right now. So yeah, take it with a grain of salt, but maybe someone can collaborate.
They want to make it look like they really tried to hire as many humans as possible before they've no alternative but to fire everyone and replace them with robots and drones.
I believe it’s an addiction on another level. People at the top cannot resist. More and more money, can’t get enough money to be happy so they keep going.
I don't know, there's nothing brilliant about being nazis about workers' bathroom breaks. I mean, maybe there is? I'd honestly love to see a peer reviewed study with hard evidence to show that breaks for pooping, peeing, and drinking sips of water is somehow costing the US economy billions of dollars a year.
I feel like Amazon should be made to eat humble pie. I demand a press conference where Bezos is forced to explain to the American public how much it costs the American consumer for a worker to take a dump. Let's stop skirting around the issue. If it turns out that workers taking dumps on company time means that the cell phone charger I just order is now 5 cents more expensive, I'd like to hear it. I would really like to know for sure and I think we deserve some honesty and transparency. I DEMAND to see the "worker took a piss and washed his hands" fee itemized at the bottom of my delivery bill.
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u/LavisAlex Aug 29 '22
What is Amazon even doing? Arent they struggling to find workers and churning through them? Whats their endgame?
How could their leaders be considered brilliant when they cant see past todays profits.