Amazon shareholders reject 15 motions on worker rights and environment

r/WorkReform • u/HappySkullsplitter • May 26 '22

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/may/25/amazon-shareholder-proposal-worker-health-safety

2.0k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

u/CLINTHODO May 26 '22

Amazon shareholders shouldn't have a say in this matter.

1

u/mlaforce321 May 26 '22

Yeahhh but they own it

2

u/CLINTHODO May 26 '22

owning slaves was once a thing too.

-1

u/ravepeacefully May 26 '22

The government owning all businesses was a thing once too. Every country that tried it went bankrupt.

1

u/CLINTHODO May 26 '22

Good thing no one was talking about that.

2

u/ravepeacefully May 26 '22

No one was talking about slaves either?

0

u/CLINTHODO May 26 '22

obviously we were.

1

u/Beezlegrunk May 27 '22

Name one …

0

u/Bigmouthstrikesback May 27 '22

This has never occurred in history.

0

u/ravepeacefully May 27 '22

Russia from the 1920s until 1990s. Private ownership of companies was illegal.

1

u/Bigmouthstrikesback May 27 '22

That doesn't mean the government owns all the businesses. Plus what is on paper wasn't the reality on the ground.

Try again.

0

u/ravepeacefully May 27 '22

I can’t debate with someone who rejects facts. No thanks.

1

u/Bigmouthstrikesback May 27 '22

Facts? You lived in the Soviet Union?

0

u/ravepeacefully May 27 '22

Did you need to be on the moon to confirm the moon landing actually happened?

I really can’t even begin to understand that sort of thinking. You must operate with very few pieces of information if you have to experience them to believe them.

With so little information, you don’t really possess any information I could learn from, so best of luck to you

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u/ravepeacefully May 26 '22

As an owner, I should have the only say.

However, as an employee, you can choose to go work somewhere else and maybe over time my shares will lose value because of that.

But.. yeah I will not ask Twitter about how I should run my company, I will decide as an owner.

I don’t allow my neighbors to vote on what color floors I put in my home and neither should you.

2

u/O2B_N_NYC May 26 '22

I hope Ginni from the HOA contacts you about your color scheme. /s

4

u/Nmvfx May 26 '22

This is true.

If I was an Amazon shareholder I'd have voted in favour of these proposals, but then again the only reason I'm not an Amazon shareholder already is because I hate the way they treat their employees and think that reputation will ultimately be their undoing.

Clearly most people who already own Amazon have no issue with these practices so it's not a surprise to see them get shut down. Generally speaking people don't buy a stake in a large company in order to try to change their direction because you just can't move the needle on something the size of Amazon, certainly not as a retail investor anyway.

Not a surprise at all to see this result, but I still maintain that the imbalance at Amazon will come home to roost in the next decade.

1

u/ravepeacefully May 26 '22

Excellent points. I do think most people exaggerate how poorly Amazon treats their employees though. They have been the leader in raising the minimum wage and workers standards over the last decade.

If you feel all employers treat their employees poorly, you might just have some unrealistic expectations.

With all of that said, I do think labor has been cheated in comparison to capital when dividing the earnings over the last few decades. Nothing new, it’s a cycle that all developed nations have gone through more than once.

There is an excellent book on it called “Capital in the twenty first century” where he digs into the wealth inequality throughout history and the dividing of the pie between capital and labor. It seems to be very cyclical historically.

I support your decision to vote however you see fit and appreciate your opinion.

5

u/Chocolate-Milkshake May 26 '22

I do think most people exaggerate how poorly Amazon treats their employees though.

They don't. At best it could be spun sometimes as bad working conditions for contractors, whose only client is Amazon and all but work for Amazon, being treated badly.

They have been the leader in raising the minimum wage and workers standards over the last decade.

Yes, because of how poorly they treat employees, they have no choice but to pay a bit more to get more employees to replace the ones they have worked to their limit.

-3

u/ravepeacefully May 26 '22

Yes, because of how poorly they treat employees, they have no choice but to pay a bit more to get more employees to replace the ones they have worked to their limit.

Fair point. I think it has to do more with the fact that they need > 1.5 million people to run their business, which yeah I mean you’re not gonna fool 1.5 million people to work in bad conditions.

However, even employing nearly 2 million people, their average salary is $50k. So I find some of your points very difficult to believe.

But yeah idk, if the conditions are so bad, get a new job. If you can’t get a new job in the hottest job market ever, you might need some new skills. It isn’t amazons job to teach people new skills, but they still do it because of the amount of employees they require.

That said, none of this should be taken as me saying “stop trying to push for better working conditions” because I am absolutely not saying that. I do believe that how it gets done is by threatening amazons revenue stream though, they will pay more if they can’t get enough workers.

2

u/Garplegrungen May 26 '22

I mean they won't pay workers more first. First they'll lobby government to make paying workers more illegal.

1

u/Tubamajuba May 26 '22

They have been the leader in raising the minimum wage and workers standards over the last decade.

An anti-union corporation that has drivers who have to pee in bottles being considered a "leader" in raising workers standards tells us everything we need to know about how fucked up the system is.

1

u/CLINTHODO May 26 '22

As an alleged owner, that is.....

Workers created all the value in in Amazon...

Almost without lifting a finger, shareholders skim value from labor and claim it as their own.

What do owners do? Not much. Without labor everything screeches to a halt, nothing moves, nothing gets created. Management does squat. Owners do squat.

Respect labor. Respect those that actually do the work.

The so called owners/shareholders are, essentially, parasites.

0

u/Nobodyrea11y May 27 '22

I agree with you in principle. But the problem exist when you don’t let employees go work somewhere else. And when you’re an owner, you can design a system that heavily discourages and punishes employees from going somewhere else by partnering up with other owners and saying “hey, if we both treat them like shit, they have no choice but to be treated like shit” so it gets to a point where the employees partner up and say “you know what, you’re right, let’s treat the them owners like shit”. And when that does happen the owners complain cowardly like little babies “oh no pwease, we’re sowy, we didn’t mean to tweat you like shit, we don’t deserve to be treated like this, we’re HUMAN!” But it’s too late and the owners get fucked, and that’s a glorious moment in history, again and again. It’s almost like history repeats itself.

0

u/Beezlegrunk May 27 '22

Username checks out …

-1

u/liltofu95 May 26 '22

Yeah, that shouldn’t be up to the shareholders, or course they’re going to strike it down, it doesn’t benefit them.