What does a BIDEN Presidency look like?

[crazy canuck]

You guys don't actually understand how tornadoes work, do you?

Tell us what we are missing.  Do people sound warning sirens for reasons other than what seems the reasonable inference - to warn that you need to take some action?

The warning sirens mean that a tornado has been seen. The action that should be taken is harder to discern.

I lived in Kansas for years. I was there for some really spectacular tornadoes, including one that killed some 40 people and I was activated as a member of the National Guard for three weeks to patrol the rubble and help clean up. I *watched* that F3 tornado go about 1/2 mile from my home while it was killing people while I watched it.

A tornado is fucking...random. It is not like a hurricane at all, where it forms over time and then devastates this massive area. It's this point thing, and the storms that generate them are often huge in area, but the tornado themselves are just fucking random pinpoints of devastation. It sucks, and is insanely hard to know what to actually DO about them in the moment.

Thanks, that helps me understand better.  And helps put the article in context - according to the article the managers had all the employees go into the hallways and bathrooms (I assume that was according to plan) but then mistakenly thought the danger was over and returned people to their work.  The article does not provide a very good chronology of events, but it looks like a case of human error rather than corporate greed.

[Solmyr]

I am just going to go ahead and be outraged at the report Syt linked, though. I know MURRICA and all that, but still.

I am skeptical. It just sounds stupid. Not that people being stupid are that hard to imagine, but this just seems extra dumb. People who run businesses are generally not so totally ignorant of basic relations between employees and managers.

You have a really rosy view of people who run businesses.

No, I just don't have a reflexive animosity against people who run businesses.

Running a business is hard. Being bad at it generally leads to failure of the business.

The market is actually pretty damn good at weeding out stupid business owners. I doubt making candles is getting massive out of market subsidies to keep them going while they blunder around making idiotic decisions.

But hey, maybe in this case they really are dumb and the market just hadn't caught up to them yet.

We weren't talking about business owners being dumb and bad at business, we were talking about them exploiting the shit out of their employees and treating them like trash. This includes one of the most successful companies of all time, Amazon. Let's face it, in our society treating your employees badly is not something that leads to failure of your business.

[Berkut]

I am just going to go ahead and be outraged at the report Syt linked, though. I know MURRICA and all that, but still.

I am skeptical. It just sounds stupid. Not that people being stupid are that hard to imagine, but this just seems extra dumb. People who run businesses are generally not so totally ignorant of basic relations between employees and managers.

You have a really rosy view of people who run businesses.

No, I just don't have a reflexive animosity against people who run businesses.

Running a business is hard. Being bad at it generally leads to failure of the business.

The market is actually pretty damn good at weeding out stupid business owners. I doubt making candles is getting massive out of market subsidies to keep them going while they blunder around making idiotic decisions.

But hey, maybe in this case they really are dumb and the market just hadn't caught up to them yet.

We weren't talking about business owners being dumb and bad at business, we were talking about them exploiting the shit out of their employees and treating them like trash. This includes one of the most successful companies of all time, Amazon. Let's face it, in our society treating your employees badly is not something that leads to failure of your business.

Except that of course that is exacty what it leads to. Your employees are an asset just like everything else, and treating them like "trash" and "exploiting the shit" out of them will cause them to leave.

Noting that one of the most successful companies of all time has been accused of doing that, and yet are still incredibly successful with huge numbers of employees who are not quitting to go work elsewhere in a free world might make you consider whether the stories of them "exploiting the shit" out of their "trash" employees might actually be entirely accurate in the first place.

I am generally skeptical of hyperbolic claims like the idea that amazingly successful companies that are reliant on a productive work force for their success treat their employees like trash and exploit the shit out of them, when it is consistently and inexplicably never backed up with actual data...

[crazy canuck]

Berkut, it is possible that US employers can treat their employees like shit because everyone else does it too.  US laws are very weak compared to other countries.  That does not happen by chance.  It is more WAD.

[alfred russel]

I was the safety officer for my floor at my company and the training I got was that when there is a high risk of tornado I was supposed to tell everyone to move away from the windows and gather in the center of the building.

[Valmy]

I was the safety officer for my floor at my company and the training I got was that when there is a high risk of tornado I was supposed to tell everyone to move away from the windows and gather in the center of the building.

That is certainly the conventional wisdom, unless you have a storm cellar obviously.

[The Brain]

I was the safety officer for my floor at my company and the training I got was that when there is a high risk of tornado I was supposed to tell everyone to move away from the windows and gather in the center of the building.

Monstrous.

[Berkut]

Berkut, it is possible that US employers can treat their employees like shit because everyone else does it too.  US laws are very weak compared to other countries.  That does not happen by chance.  It is more WAD.

That works as long as you don't believe in free markets.

I am not some kind of libertarian right to work guy.

But if you want to argue that working conditions are shit at Company X, you have to explain why people work there.

And there is this total logical and rational break in these discussions. People will argue that

A) labor is critical, and in fact, will argue that labor is not just important, it is the MOST important thing, and the key to all business success.

Then they will turn around and argue that employers all treat their people like shit as a matter of routine, and this is both unfair AND stupid, since (A). But at the same time, somehow in a free world world where people can go work anywhere they want, they somehow cannot leave their shitty job where they are treated like "trash" for a better job, because somehow all jobs are exactly equally shitty, even though because of (A), any company that offered better conditions would by definition be insanely successful.

It doesn't make any sense.

Labor laws in the US are not great, and could be a LOT better. There are great arguments to be made about how we should make them better. Mandatory PTO, maternity/paternity leave, greater ability for labor to organize. All these things should, IMO, be looked at and agressively reformed. It is long overdue.

But this story of ubiquitous, persistent, and largely horror working conditions in America were stories of evil managers forcing their poor workers to slave away in shit conditions while they die like flies to tornadoes resonate are just ridiculous.

Emploers, just like employees, respond to incentives. The idea that employers are all sitting around treating their employees like trash and exploiting them is just fucking bullshit. It might be true somewhere in America, but I've been working in America since I was 14. I've had shitty bosses and managers, and excellent ones. I've yet to see more than a bare handful that I would consider outright malevolent or not operating in good faith. 

[crazy canuck]

I agree that the article is not about evil companies driving their employees to work to their deaths.  See my post above about that.

But what we are talking about now is something different.  If the free market provided sufficient protection to workers then there would be no need for legislation doing so.  Simple belief in a a free market does not work.

[Admiral Yi]

We weren't talking about business owners being dumb and bad at business, we were talking about them exploiting the shit out of their employees and treating them like trash. This includes one of the most successful companies of all time, Amazon. Let's face it, in our society treating your employees badly is not something that leads to failure of your business.

What does "exploit" mean when we're talking about mentally functioning adult workers?  Amazon warehouse workers are under no coercion, they are free to apply for any job they want to, and they are free to quit any time they want to.  AFAIK they have not been lied to or defrauded.

How can that be exploitation?

[HVC]

how do you jive having to pee in bottle because if you take bathroom breaks you'll be fired with not being exploited?

[Admiral Yi]

how do you jive having to pee in bottle because if you take bathroom breaks you'll be fired with not being exploited?

I don't remember reading in that article any mention of getting fired for taking bathroom breaks.

[HVC]

It's an extrapolation. Taking bathroom breaks puts you behind your metrics. You get behind you get fired. But we'll get more into the semantics of it, does feeling that you can't take a bathroom break for fear of reprisal mean you're exploited? How many people have to feel that way before it's a exploitive  in a workplace? 1 employee. 1%, 5%, 20%?

[Admiral Yi]

Right, or to put it another way, you have to make X deliveries in Y hours, and some people will need to cut corners to make quota. 

I don't think that's exploitation.  I think that's a worker who is a bad fit for the job.

[HVC]

Do you believe there is a point where quotas become unreasonable?