Yep, there needs to be real consequences. In addition, no member of that board or executive team should be able to act in those positions in any company for like 5 yrs.
Yeah but then how would I be able to get that napkin holder that I ordered in my underwear delivered tomorrow! You don’t understand how much I need this thing right now even though I can’t be bothered to get dressed and drive my ass to the store.
How about if the company is so large and sewn into the fabric of the modern world then instead of dissolving the company it instantly becomes a public utility, turn the shares into treasury bonds, and jail the executives?
I don’t really see any other company building massive warehouses that employs millions of underserved people and providing them with decent paying jobs with good benefits. I don’t think 1.6million Americans should be unemployed because of shady actions of the execs.
People are still fling to buy shit. Maybe they have to do it locally instead? Probably some other company would step up to replace their monopoly. It’s only be an improvement.
So we should just make almost 2 million Americans unemployed because some execs shredded some papers. I don’t know if you know anything about retail work, but they pay less than Amazon does, very few actually pay over $15 an hour, Walmart starts you out at $12 an hour.
It wasn’t necessarily Amazon that killed of the competition, it’s the tech behind Amazon (e-commerce) that killed retail stores. Just like UBER demolished the taxi industry, just like cars replaced horse carriages, and just like AI’s about to make knowledge workers completely obsolete. Amazon still has a great deal of competition from Walmart, Target, and lots of retailers.
Shopify accounts for 1/3 of all e-commerce sales in the US in 2023, and with the rise of way cheaper Chinese alternatives to amazon like shien, Temu, & Alibaba express no one really has a monopolistic control in the e-commerce space.
Yes but no. E-commerce got rid of many retail jobs. So did WalMart. But Amazon also uses a ton of monopolistic and dirty practices. Amazon is working hard to eliminate the competition, because capitalists would rather control the market than compete.
There are so many things that we could talk about. I think the simplest thing to realize is that Amazon was losing money for years so that they could become the central hub of vast numbers of shoppers and sellers, and after they got control of the market, they had a huge amount of leverage over all of those people. Now they can increase prices and manipulate search results, as recent court cases have shown us. They also do horrible things to their workers, they try to bust unionization, many of their delivery drivers are peeing in plastic bottles because they don’t have time to stop at a public restrooms, the list goes on and on.
Because it’s such an exhaustive list, and because I don’t think you should take my words at face value, I highly recommend that you read the newspaper. There’s so much great information compiled by people online. When in doubt, start with Cory Doctorow.
I don’t think forcing people to work in inhumane conditions while paying them close to nothing, so that they still need to use food stamps, counts as employing. It sounds more like exploiting the most vulnerable people, which have no other employment option, because big monopolies like Amazon killed all the competition
No one’s forced to work at Amazon. For unskilled uneducated Americans $16 an hour is higher than what you can make in retail or fast food, which are some of the only options left especially for Americans in the rust belt. It’s not monopolies that killed jobs that used to provide livable wages like manufacturing it’s globalization. I’m not mad at your ignorance because I didn’t realize how bad parts of America were until I moved to the rust belt. If you want to blame anyone for the lack of quality employment for undeducated Americans blame the politicians and greedy companies that let high paying jobs go overseas to China and Mexico.
Honestly, I don’t think the company needs to be dissolved, but I think that accountability for the law should exist at director level and up. For a company the size of Amazon, that’s probably around 100 people that should face the consequences - and that’s only the retail org.
The best description of Amazon is that it is a management company. It’s not a retailer, or a tech company. It’s output is its management process, and it’s this that it uses to build products in different markets.
So, remove the source of those processes. Let people move up to higher roles, and let someone not breaking the law take the senior positions.
The EPI estimated about $50 billion per year in wage theft back in 2014 which would equate to about $65 billion today. It could also have changed a bit since then.
of course they did, the penalty for getting caught destroying evidence is far, far less than the penalty for the price fixing they’re accused of. the law is designed to incentivize them to do this.
we could make it so that the penalty for destroying evidence in a court case once its been subpoenaed is twice the penalty of the original case, but we don’t. we could make CEOs responsible for the actions of their employees (after all, they’re quick to claim responsibility for the actions of their employees when those actions generate money), but we don’t.
It’s not going to stop until we start holding executives physically responsible for their crimes in disfiguring ways. “Why is the right half of your face missing, Bob?” “Insider trading” he writes on an index card because he’s been debarked.
Summary: There is a normal percentage of theft compared to previous years, but because of inflation the estimated dollar amounts are “unprecedented.” Please don’t ask about the unprecedented profits.
Clickbait headline articles need to be shocking sounding. Bonus points if they push the narrative that companies are good and us horrible peasant thieves stealing from them are bad.
It’s almost like their workers should form some sort of association so that they could collectively work to negotiate with Amazon on a more equal footing. Too bad that never happened ever in the history of the human workforce. Sure would be nice, though. Oh, wait…
It’s worth noting that when retail sales go up, as they did in 2022, shrink also tends to rise. The average shrink rate in the 2022 fiscal year was 1.6%, up from 1.4% the year before. The latest figure is in line with shrink rates from 2019 and 2020.
Just a correction: wage theft accounted for up to $50 billion in 2014 according to the EPI, not 2017. That would be roughly $65 billion today. Like you, I would also like to see more recent numbers.
I will only be surprised if someone actually ends up going to prison. More likely, the company will just get hit with a fine that’s just the cost of doing business.
Although Romney said, “Corporations are people too, my friend” you can’t throw Amazon in jail.
Closest they can do is a forced break up. A “Ma Bell” so to speak 🔔
Amazon now has to direct all managers watch a data retention video every year for the next five years, is allowed two years to roll this out, and can appeal in 3 years.
All I’m saying is that if I’m doing self-checkout, and something I’m buying is missing its code, it’s probably going to be the cheapest thing I can get to go through.
I’ll bet these companies throw everything under the sun into the theft bucket. That includes internal mishandling of inventory. They then exaggerate the costs for insurance claims. 
$348 Million just to plan seems completely fucking ridiculous. I write in ignorance as I know nothing of civil engineering, but holy crap does that number seem goofy.
Just for context the Seattle regional area is spending over $50 billion on expanding light rail with st3. I'm not sure what goes into planning but this whole endeavor isn't gonna be cheap.
Once you factor in the best fit route, including through both major cities, seismic and land surveys, figuring out and plotting of new bridges, figuring out who owns what and how to best double existing track with a new high speed track, getting land for a new yard.
I can see planning hitting that much, yeah.
Hell, if we're using the Amtrack stations it has to tunnel under modern Seattle, as well as figure out how its getting through to downtown Vancouver across at least one river crossing in a busy and populated area.
Also, consider how much the conservatives under Christy Clark spent to get the evergreen line built and the pre-build surveys cost well above the 10 million dollar range and were completely wrong and lead to massive cost overruns. Edit: The underground area in question was roughly 6 blocks long.
I was an operations director in a prior role and oversaw the design and construction of several buildings. The last building was about $70 million, and we spent around $6 million on the design and programming.
What most folks don't understand is the scale of minutiae. I've spent an entire day of meetings hashing out floor box standards between all parties (IT, facilities, design, construction). The amount of preliminary site studies, permit planning, etc, that goes into hundreds of miles of rail, plus stations, interesting into existing infrastructure etc... It's significant.
I've also overwhelmed fiber builds, and have seen costs range upwards of $500k-$1m per mile of new fiber depending on if poles exist, or of trenching, right of way, permits, etc.
And all of this is just the tip of the iceberg for what goes into these plans.
Right, essentially every single foot of this rail line needs analysis and design. Geotechnical, transportation, civil, electrical, environmental, mechanical, computer, engineers will all have their hands on it, then there’s coordination between municipal groups, which covers the whole spectrum because it’s international.
A bigger project might seem simpler to the public, but effort and complexity often increases disproportionally to the scale of the project for engineers.
Geotech analysis (this is an earthquake zone), multiple route options with associated costs (read: lots of math), the required community info sessions and feedback (repeat that a few times), route alterations from the politics, eventual route selection, then actual detailed design can begin on structures, electrical systems, etc (read: lots of math).
A previous state report speculated that construction may cost $42 billion in 2017 dollars. That sum should be considered low until proven otherwise, in light of the 0% engineering; the soaring costs for California’s high-speed rail program, whose ultimate San Francisco-Los Angeles network could reach $128 billion; and process delays in Seattle’s own Sound Transit 3, whose $11 billion Ballard-Sodo light-rail segment won’t complete preliminary engineering until 2026, a full decade after voters approved higher taxes.
If planning could help prevent mistakes and delays costing something on the order of years and billions of dollars, half a billion to plan (1% of a lower-end estimated cost) doesn’t seem so bad to me at all.
Coming from someone who very much endorses amtrak and passenger rail, I think someone is abusing our tax dollars to make six figure jobs for their friends or family. Just look how much money is going into repeatedly studying if the stampede pass would be a viable passenger rail line.
Layoffs at a company like Amazon – which has a relatively low cash salary ceiling – is more of a way to steal employee pay, in the way of keeping unvested stocks that were part of a compensation package.
I never liked stocks as part of compensation packages purely from the point you don’t even know if you will actually vest and receive that stock because who knows what will happn in 3-5 years. Let alone what the stock price will be by then.
Amazon corporate employees get RSUs which are stocks, not options. After the new hire RSUs go away, you end up with two vest dates a year and new comp offerings start the following year (so in 2024 you’ll see new money in 2025 plus a small base salary bump that goes in effect that month).
Tech salaries are frequently stock based, but Amazon’s is unusual in that it’s only twice a year, and bumps start the following year, and they recently made the change to do 2 year offers instead of 3 years.
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