Backroom Errata

**Montmorency** · 08-16-2018, 13:55

Amazon warehouse work experience:

Bloodworth says it felt like a “prison,” with workers constantly monitored and having to pass through security whenever they went on break or to the bathroom. (Time spent in the security line is, of course, unpaid.) Warehouse workers frequently walked ten miles a day across ten and a half hour shifts, and frequently worked mandatory overtime. The hand-held devices they carried frequently transmitted “admonishments to speed up” and ranked workers from “highest to lowest in terms of the speed at which we collected the items.

The atmosphere was suffused with jargonistic bullshit. You weren’t supposed to call it a “warehouse,” but a “fulfillment center.” Workers weren’t “fired,” they were “released.” (That one might be accurate.) In fact, they weren’t even “workers,” they were “associates,” and Bloodworth days that on day one management told them that Amazon was an egalitarian workplace because “Jeff Bezos is an associate and so are all of you.” (Some associates are more equal than others, by about $150 billion.) Posters of happy employees had captions like “We love coming to work and miss it when we’re not here!”, though Bloodworth cites a survey of Amazon staff showing: 91 percent wouldn’t recommend working there, 89 percent felt exploited, 71 percent reported walking more than 10 miles per day, and 78 percent felt their breaks were too short. Workers were disciplined with “points,” and anyone who received six points would be fired—sorry, “released,” with points given out for “being sick” or “being late because the Amazon bus didn’t show up.”

But, amusingly, Amazon did not actually deny my actual factual assertions. Instead, it said things like “We don’t recognise the claim that people walk 20 miles” and “The article references people collapsing, which is not something we recognise.” Not that it doesn’t happen. Just that they don’t recognize it!

Generations ago, this is genuinely what people speculated a communist dystopia would look like.

**Husar** · 08-16-2018, 15:21

Originally Posted by Montmorency

Generations ago, this is genuinely what people speculated a communist dystopia would look like.

But they're free to quit and go live under a bridge instead!

**Crandar** · 08-18-2018, 14:53

Fox struggling against the Japanese and the Danes.

**Montmorency** · 10-07-2018, 06:15

Money is power to order the material world. The state's power runs as far as the material world does, no more but not inevitably less. The purpose of taxing the rich must be framed in terms of breaking their power, not in terms of 'paying for things'.

Wealth may be immoral in its own right, but unaccountable power is even worse.

Originally Posted by Beardsley Rumi, Chairman of NY Fed, 1945

Final freedom from the domestic money market exists for every sovereign national state where there exists an institution which functions in the manner of a modern central bank, and whose currency is not convertible into gold or into some other commodity. The United States is a national state which has a central banking system, the Federal Reserve System, and whose currency, for domestic purposes, is not convertible into any commodity. It follows that our Federal Government has final freedom from the money market in meeting its financial requirements. Accordingly, the inevitable social and economic consequences of any and all taxes have now become the prime consideration in the imposition of taxes. In general, it may be said that since all taxes have consequences of a social and economic character, the government should look to these consequences in formulating its tax policy. All federal taxes must meet the test of public policy and practical effect. The public purpose which is served should never be obscured in a tax program under the mask of raising revenue.

**Viking** · 10-07-2018, 11:18

Originally Posted by Montmorency

Money is power to order the material world. The state's power runs as far as the material world does, no more but not inevitably less. The purpose of taxing the rich must be framed in terms of breaking their power, not in terms of 'paying for things'.

So you move power from one small group of people to another small group of people, effectively concentrating the power at the hands of a smaller number of people overall. Then what?

Wealth may be immoral in its own right, but unaccountable power is even worse.

No one is unaccountable.