Obama Praises Amazon At One of Its Controversial Warehouses 435
theodp writes "In his first term, President Obama was a big booster of indie bookstores. But on Tuesday, the President chose to deliver his speech on Jobs for the Middle Class at one of Amazon's controversial fulfillment centers in Chattanooga, TN. 'Amazon is a great example of what's possible,' said Obama, who also toured the 'amazing facility' where workers can make $10.50-$11.50 an hour as an employee of Integrity Staffing Group, 'may also be eligible for medical and dental benefits', and 'must be able to stand/walk for up to 10-12 hours' in temperatures that 'will occasionally exceed 90 degrees.' So, are '21st century migrant workers' the new middle class?"
Misleading summary (Score:5, Insightful)
In his speech, Obama outlines the areas he believes the country needs to focus on "if we want to create good jobs that pay good wages in durable industries." Among these priorities, listed in order of mention, are: manufacturing and high-tech jobs, infrastructure jobs, and clean energy jobs
"Controversial?" (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm seriously failing to see what about these jobs makes them "controversial." The pay and working conditions seem to be completely in line with the type of work it entails. It's certainly better than minimum wage or a true "factory" job (in terms of safety).
Re:Misleading summary (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing about indie bookstores is largely irrelevant. Choosing to give a speech about 'good jobs that pay good wages in durable industries' in a fulfillment sweatshop that will continue to use expendable temps only so long as robots can't economically handle irregularly shaped packages is... perhaps a bad sign...
Keep up the selfishness.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Welcome to the another manifestation of the culture of "I've got mine. Fuck you."
Re:America the beautiful (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Keep up the selfishness.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Middle Class (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Keep up the selfishness.. (Score:5, Insightful)
"I've got mine. Fuck you."
Woah, wait a minute... (Score:5, Insightful)
good high wage jobs (Score:3, Insightful)
Funny how hard it is to live on one of these 'good, high wage jobs'. Working in tech obviously I'm used to high compensation for my time, but I've done military, machining, making packaging for frozen dinners, etc etc. It's funny how the more physically demanding the job is the harder they want you to work to have to joy of keeping your job while at the same time paying you 1/4th what you make with a desk job. There is a skill difference in the work obviously but I don't think anyone should go home after a 40+ hr week with too little money to live. You can get by on 11 in the burbs but what if your job is in the city? Somehow Starbucks employees are just supposed to "get by". Getting by usually means 25+ year olds still living with their parents because their full time job isn't enough to be able to afford a place of their own.
Funny how Walmart offered suggestions on budgeting recently that excluded the cost of heating (don't remember if transportation was on there or not, but heck bus both ways to a 5 day a week job will probably run you $80 a month at least so you'd be working for your first day and a half of the month just to get to work).
Wow - how did this one get approved at /. ??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Relentless war which the globalist elites are waging against any possible middle class opposition - CHECK.
Utter hypocrisy of moving employees off-book, into sub-contractor scams, where hours are guaranteed to be less than 30-per-week so as not to qualify for Obamacare - CHECK.
Big-$$$ campaign contributions and other goodies being laundered from Bezos through Gorelick and into the Chicago Machine - CHECK.
Hypocrisy of Martha's Vineyard vacationing politician, who otherwise would love him some indie bookstores, heading to the mother of all vertical bidnesses for a little facetime on the evening newz - CHECK.
What's next, an honest discussion of why Fuckerberg and Ballzmer and L-Word-ison really want all those H1B aliens?
Might be a good day to go long on some snowball contracts in Hell.
Re:People Need to Get Over Themselves (Score:3, Insightful)
I sold dew worms to fishermen for a year to buy my first computer
And now you can't even buy a cup of coffee with what you'd get from doing that.
Everybody wants it all but doesn't want to work for it. Guess what? It doesn't work that way
You're right, the people who have it all don't work for it, they've already got it and now they spend their days on the golf course making the hard decisions of which division to amputate in order to make this quarter's numbers look good enough for a bonus.
$11.50 an hour... (Score:5, Insightful)
...is not middle fucking class.
Re:"Be content to be slaves" (Score:4, Insightful)
The claims of socialist look dumber by the day.
Obama is just more pro-corporate than Bush, Sr... just a tad less than Bush, Jr.
Re:What's your boggle, citizen? (Score:5, Insightful)
These are shitty, high stress jobs for people near the end of their ropes.
Ah, so these are the new middle class American jobs!
Do you know what a middle class job is? (Score:5, Insightful)
What are you talking about?
They're decent, honest jobs that pay a fair wage.
That's about as middle class as it gets.
Ummm, no. Physical working conditions are certainly great, but Amazon fulfillment warehouses are notoriously known for driving workers into a state of constant terror due to managerial abuse. A middle class job used to imply a sort of shielding from such things (not totally but certainly more than what you would see and still see at a minimum wage fast food joint.)
Middle class doesn't imply that anymore. And $10-$12 an hour is $24K. That is not below what is typically considered a low-end middle class salary. $24K was middle class twenty years ago. Not anymore. They are just above the limit that forces people to use social services.
I'm not saying these jobs are decent or honest (and thank God they are not Walmart salaries.) Any job with salaries above the poverty line is better than no job or poverty-line job, anytime, any day. And I'm not saying that for the type of job being performed, these are not fair wages. They are.
But let us not call them middle class wages. They are not. The rising cost of living, education and health care, and the continuous shift towards replacing full-time workers with part-time workers (or contractors) have pretty much made sure a $12/h job is not a middle class job anymore.
How is this controversial? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see anything controversial about the warehouse. It's hot (or cold) unskilled manual labor. It pays above minimum wage, but like most jobs with unskilled labor, pays no benefits. They do not do so because it would not provide them with any competitive advantage vs. other fulfillment companies.
Breaking the "race to the bottom" to make sure you won't starve to death and have access to things like basic medical care when you are a productive member of society (fulfilling your end of the "social contract") is arguably a useful thing for government to do.
Re:Obama hates America (Score:5, Insightful)
Plain and simple: Obama is turning America into a third world nation.
Don't give him too much credit - he has plenty of help.
No, it's not, and it's a shame. (Score:5, Insightful)
You are correct; $11.50 an hour is not middle-class. However, that no-benefit salary is usually enough to make you ineligible for things like Medicaid (even though you aren't buying jack-$hit in medical care on that paycheck) or a Public Defender if you are accused of a crime.
It's a tragedy that a productive member of society that is fulfilling his/her end of the "social contract" still cannot obtain the things we would expect every civilized nation to make sure it's citizens have access to.
The most conservative president in history... (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't know why anyone is surprised to see Obama praising the Amazon warehouse. It cuts jobs and neglects the value of employees; those are classic conservative values. And don't try to claim that the massive health insurance industry bailout act (aka "ObamaCare") is somehow not a conservative act; Reagan would have crapped himself with excitement over signing a bill into law that forces average Americans to become consumers of for-profit businesses.
Funny but the guy doesn't remember his own schtick (Score:5, Insightful)
In late August 2008, Then Senator Obama gave a little speech in a airline maintenance hanger in Kansas City. He complained about the Republicans and how much ground the middle class had lost, about healthcare. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xauuo1CvexE [youtube.com] Listening to it now it still echos of somebody who didn't have ideas then and certainly has no ideas now. What's ironic about his middle class speech there is that American Airlines closed down that maintenance facility in 2010.. http://www.dallasnews.com/business/headlines/20100924-American-Airlines-closes-former-TWA-base-878.ece [dallasnews.com]
Sounds like the same schtick over and over again.
Re:"Be content to be slaves" (Score:5, Insightful)
The claims of socialist look dumber by the day.
Obama is just more pro-corporate than Bush, Sr... just a tad less than Bush, Jr.
That's what the Democratic Party has become, "not quite as bad as the Republicans." The difference between the two is that when a Republican gives government money to a business it's to encourage growth; when a Democrat does it, it's for jobs. Neither end up happening.
There isn't a party out there that represents the working class.
crap job better than no job doesn't make it good (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazon is contracting these jobs out so they are distanced from the managerial abuses, lack of benefits, instability, and poor working conditions.
AND THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES HOLDS THIS UP AS A PARAGON TO BE EMULATED.
Re:Wow - how did this one get approved at /. ??? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:"Be content to be slaves" (Score:5, Insightful)
> Most of the people that I know that support him honestly assume that he struggled and grew up in the deep south (instead of Hawaii) like them.
What rock have you been hiding under? Blacks aren't restricted to the deep south. Neither are bigots that think they aren't bigots despite an eagerness to assume some goofy kid is a dangerous criminal.
Re:Hope and change the Obummer way! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Keep up the selfishness.. (Score:2, Insightful)
In other words, "I've got mine. Fuck you."
The real problem is wage disparity between the people running the place and the ones on the bottom rung.
No, the real problem is all of y'all on the bottom rung are stepping on each other to try to get up, and you just don't care.
Divide and Conquer (Score:4, Insightful)
What has happened is(for lack of a better term, and a nod to Queensryche's 1988 masterwork, "Operation Mindcrime") that the 1% that rule America discovered how to "divide and conquer", as if that tactic hasn't been used countless times through history with the same results. Since the 1980s(yea, you've heard this before) the 1% have successfully rolled back the social safety nets, which in the past were mainly affecting the poor. Now the middle class is sliding down into poverty.
This is no "market adjustment" or "realignment of labor forces". This is nothing less that a concerted and tightly executed plan to turn the US into a third world country, where the vast majority of the population is poor, marginalized and has little or no political or economic power, where a small elite controls all facets of society.
The lessons learned from the affects of Robber Baron Capitalism and The Great Depression have been utterly lost. Utterly Lost...
Re:Keep up the selfishness.. (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words "Your brick and mortar was shit, fuck you".
Re:Wow - how did this one get approved at /. ??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Err, this isn't something just with Amazon.
This is becoming a pretty widespread result of Obamacare...lots of places are reducing hours to keep from having to pay the new fees/taxes.
It isn't even doing it through subcontractors. I know of other businesses that are reducing hours to under 30. My Mom got caught up on this....and I know of others in the retail (national department stores) that are getting hit the same way.
Also, there's lots of small businesses that are hanging at the 49 employee number to avoid the Obamacare mandates.
Whether you agree with Obamacare in full, in part or not at all....I think most everyone can see that these two reactions in particular apparently weren't anticipated as side effects as widespread as they seem to be at this point.
Re:Wal-Mart Effect (Score:5, Insightful)
MAP is nothing more than collusion.
I think they should be flatly illegal. In a totally free market no one would ever obey them.
You don't want a free market you want a market that is ruled the way you like.
The correct solution to amazon paying this little is just to raise the minimum wage for this job. If you don't want to do that, then you think this wage is fine.
Re:"Be content to be slaves" (Score:3, Insightful)
But, when said young man fits the description of those commiting crimes in that area (often pictured on camera footage on the news), is it being bigoted to be a little fearful when you see someone of that description approaching you just because there is a race difference?
I think it is more pattern observation, and you tend to be a bit reserved/alarmed/reactionary when you see someone that fits the description of those committing the most crimes in a certain area. Seems a natural self protections reaction more that unadulterated bigotry.
If one observes a pigeon shitting on all the cars in one area (under a statue perhaps), is it bigotry to be a little cautious parking your car and seeing a a pigeon heading your way....maybe you want to park somewhere else ?
Re:Wal-Mart Effect (Score:2, Insightful)
???
I read the part about simple day laborers sorting boxes making nearly $12 / hour and was amazed....that's pretty high pay for manual, no education required, simple work.
I wouldn't have guessed hourly pay was that much for a grunt job like that.
Re:What's your boggle, citizen? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it fair? No. Life isn't fair.
That was my attitude until the last few years. After '08 financial crisis, read about the top 1%, the ecnomy improving yet hiring was stagnant, the board members of investment firms getting off scott free & blaming lower level execs for breaking the law, increadible mis-management and wheel sleeping morons at the SEC, the American prison population quadrupling over the last 10 years, the whole-sale gutting of the right of habeas corpus, and the complete lack of caring or understanding of the removal of the many fundamental constitutional rights here, I am of a mind that its beyond "not fair", but the game is rigged and not rigged for me or you. And you'd be a fool to think otherwise.
Re:"Be content to be slaves" (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Misleading summary (Score:4, Insightful)
No, its not. It may have the same effect as a subsidy, but its not a subsidy.
The Wikipedia article on Subsidy [wikipedia.org] paraphrases the Collins Dictionary of Economics:
Which explicitly says a tax break is an indirect subsidy.
Oh and calling tax write-offs that oil companies take over employee benefits and such a "subsidy", when every other type of company can use those same write-offs is being disingenuous.
That's a strawman argument, he clearly wrote "tax break to a specific industry or individual". Clearly if everyone other type of company can use the same write-off it's not for a specific industry or individual. Calling your opponent disingenuous for making an argument they clearly haven't made only makes you look foolish.