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    GoldenMamaHamilton Nolan
    10/22/15 12:01pm

    Every time I travel to a physical store and pay more for an item that I could get a little cheaper online I feel good about myself. Usually the savings aren’t that much anyway. $4 here and $3 there. Same with cabs. Technology is destroying jobs and in many cases, as we can see here, lives. Technology is killing people.

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      SamBiddlesLegacyFratGoldenMama
      10/22/15 12:08pm

      lol, people like you are such insufferable pieces of shit.

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      GRAY-pefruitSmileGoldenMama
      10/22/15 12:22pm

      The problem I have have is that most of the time, local bricks and mortar sites don’t carry what I’m looking for.

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    Sean BrodyHamilton Nolan
    10/22/15 12:04pm

    I really wish stories like this would get the kind of traction that the NY Times one did about Amazon’s corporate culture.
    The warehouse work is crazy tough and the employment conditions are a joke.

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      HexpieSean Brody
      10/22/15 12:27pm

      My company has some very sweet warehouses with top of the industry conditions and excellent pay and bennies. But we only have like 8 people per warehouse, the ROBOTS get all the suffering.

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      StraelboraSean Brody
      10/22/15 2:54pm

      I had a student (adult, going back to school at a community college) who worked at the local Amazon warehouse. She was pregnant and the nearest toilet was literally as far away as a couple city blocks. She had to pee frequently, but the supervisor wouldn’t move her to a work station closer to the toilet, and kept writing her up for being absent from her work station for too long.

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    Armageddon T. ThunderbirdHamilton Nolan
    10/22/15 12:03pm

    Why learn about the history of abused labor when we can just relive it?

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      BobbySeriousArmageddon T. Thunderbird
      10/22/15 12:09pm

      Well at least we got rid of those evil unions.

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    BobbySeriousHamilton Nolan
    10/22/15 12:07pm

    Temporary jobs should not be allowed to run longer than a few months. And before anyone says, “they’ll just fire and rehire new temps”, in most cases, no they won’t as the cost of actually finding a new GOOD employee, and then hiring and training them will make it cost prohibitive.

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      ReburnsABurningReturnsBobbySerious
      10/22/15 12:36pm

      You can bet your ass that they would absolutely fire and re-hire to avoid having to bring on those workers full time if you tried to set some sort of time limit on “seasonal” employment to force them to hire workers like Lockhart.

      Amazon doubles their workforce for their busy season, which runs 3-4 months, which means that they have the smaller workforce for 8-9 months.

      Paying more than twice the number of workers you need for eight months out of the year is going to cost way more than it is going to cost them to have to go through the hassle and expense of having multiple cycles with seasonal workers. Believing otherwise just displays complete and total ignorance about the cost of employment and training.

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      StraelboraReburnsABurningReturns
      10/22/15 2:45pm

      Having lived in a Randian future US (that is, a shit hole country in Latin America), that’s exactly what happens. Unemployment is so high, and those with businesses control so many aspects of society, that this is exactly what happens. People get jobs with a ‘temporary training salary’ that is a reduced rate of the minimum allowable wage. After 90 days, they wage is supposed to jump up to the legal amount. On day 89, the employee is told that his or her services are no longer required, and someone else starts in that position the next day.

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    dolemiteHamilton Nolan
    10/22/15 12:18pm

    Everyone here in Fall River is so excited about the new Amazon fulfillment center being built. Everyone here in Fall River is really fucking stupid.

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      ReburnsABurningReturnsdolemite
      10/22/15 12:48pm

      I’m not sure why you wouldn’t be.

      Amazon isn’t going to be supplanting local businesses. Whatever stores they were going to drive out of business in your area are either already gone or this fullfillment center won’t speed up their demise anyways.

      Sure, the jobs aren’t great, the supervisors almost always suck, but as someone who worked in a warehouse in Bumblefuck, Texas for a while at a time in my life when I had zero marketable skills besides being young and reasonably fit, I was happy as hell that there was a big box retailer warehouse nearby. Reading the linked story, it appears Lockhart, who had lost a job and lived in an area with a hilariously weak economy, was in the same boat.

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    ReburnsABurningReturnsHamilton Nolan
    10/22/15 12:31pm

    Seasonal work is never going to be optimal but will always exist, because there’s no world where any business that has to more than double a segment of it’s workforce to keep up with seasonal demand is going to hire all of those people for full-time positions.

    However, that shouldn’t stop us from adding some better protections for contract workers in general into law.

    I also thought it was interesting to note that the local area had become economically depressed. It’s much easier to fight for better benefits and working conditions when labor is, relatively speaking, a more scarce commodity, but given what’s going on around the world, the glory days of the 20th century where that reality was in and of itself a huge boon to us, probably won’t be coming back any time soon.

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