AMAZON - BILLIONAIRE JEFF BEZOS SAYS HE WANTS HIS MULES YOUNG, CHEAP AND OVERWORKED!

AMAZON CEO & BILLIONAIRE JEFF 

BEZOS SAYS HE COULD NOT HAVE DONE

IT BY PAYING LIVING WAGES TO THE 

AMAZON SLAVES!

            

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/05/jeff-bezos-says-exploiting-amazon.html

California Amazon worker speaks out:

“Amazon fired me because I complained about age discrimination”

By Evan Blake
20 June 2017

The International Amazon Workers Voice (IAWV) was recently contacted by a former employee at the Amazon distribution center in Patterson, California, who was fired by the company last December after receiving three dubious “write-ups.” The 51-year-old worker, who wished to remain anonymous, asserts that she faced age discrimination and was driven out of her job after filing a complaint.

“I was fired because I filed a complaint against a manager. If it had been just another associate, it probably would have been different... There is age discrimination involved, and there are several people that are being held back from being promoted because of it. I made a stink about it, so I ended up getting fired under false pretenses,” she told the IAWV.

Thousands of workers at Amazon have stories of abuse at the hands of the corporate giant, which treats workers like raw material for exploitation. “It's sickening,” the worker said. “It's crazy. They're making money hand over fist, and they can't take care of their workers? They work us to death and then basically when there's nothing left, they get rid of them and replace them with a new batch. We just carry them on our backs, and when our backs break they kick us to the side and get somebody else.”

Soon after she began working for Amazon in 2013, she became interested in job training to learn the skills for “Problem Solve,” a form of quality control at Amazon warehouses. After being told repeatedly for over a year that she would be trained in the near future, and seeing younger, newly-hired coworkers offered the training, she decided to speak with the “Learning Center,” a precursor to speaking with Human Resources (HR).

In response to her complaint, she says an official at the “Learning Center” responded, “Well, you know, Amazon is a younger company and you would probably feel better if you got a job somewhere else.”

When she filed a complaint, the company ignored her, she said. “As far as I know the person that told me I should work somewhere else never even got reprimanded. None of the managers were reprimanded. I was the one who paid for it. I lost my job, I lost my insurance, I lost everything,” she told the IAWV.

That’s when she says the retribution began.

She explained that she transferred to a new unit but that during her training, the manager who was training her was pulled away and she ended up only receiving an hour-and-a-half of training before being sent to work.

Within her first month of stowing while under-trained, she received her first write-up for a “miscount,” three of which result in firing. While management told her they would send someone to complete her training after her first write-up, she asserts that they didn't do so until after her third write-up, at which point she was already set to be fired.

“What they do, and at least our facility is famous for doing this, is they wait until you're at least halfway through your shift and then pull you off the floor and escort you out the door. It's awful... You have to walk through the warehouse to get to the front of the building, and that warehouse is 1.5 million square feet.”

After she was fired, she was left without healthcare. Shortly after she began working, she suffered a serious wrist injury, and then later a shoulder injury, both of which are now chronic and have kept her from finding work elsewhere since being fired. She noted, “Every chronic injury that I now have happened at Amazon.” Losing her health insurance has hindered her recovery, and she is currently unable to lift her injured arm.

Describing the daily injuries at Amazon, she said, “Somebody's always getting hurt in the warehouse, usually shoulders, elbows, wrists, backs from picking stuff up. They tell you to ask someone to help you, but people don't want to help because you get what's called 'time on task,' and if your 'time on task' isn't right, you can get written up. So they tell us to ask for help with heavy lifting, but then we can't help because if we do we're 'time off task,' and if we're 'time off task' then we're gonna get written up. So it's a catch-22, you're screwed either way.”

She also described a pattern of favoritism among overseers, who she says tend to place older workers in areas that require them to lift heavier items, seemingly in an effort to drive them out of the company. She noted that the Patterson warehouse “works with everything weighing up to 50 pounds. They knew I had a repetitive injury to my shoulder and wrist from lifting the heavy stuff and they still put me on heavy lifting. If they know there's something wrong with you, it's like they purposely set out to worsen the condition.”

“There's a lot of favoritism. They say there isn't, but you ask anybody that works in AFE where we pack multiples, and they'll tell you who gets the best walls. There are nine walls where the items get sent down in trays and the manager controls what size trays go to which wall. If it's all small items, it'll go to Wall 2. If it's larger items like dog food, bottled water or heavier items, it'll go to Wall 8 or 9. And if you're not in good with one of the managers, they'll make sure that you're stuck down on Wall 8 or 9, which are consistently the worst walls to work on.”

Describing the atmosphere at the Patterson facility, she said, “Demoralized is an understatement. The overall feeling is that you have certain people who are the pets, the favored ones, and they tend to walk all over everybody else.”

She added, “It's ridiculous how much they push you, they push you so hard. If you make quota, you would think they'd be happy. But when you make quota, then they start pushing you harder, because they want more... They keep raising the rates and pushing us harder, and it's like, how are we supposed to keep up with that? You're talking about young kids that can't even keep up with that.”

She agreed that the entire working class is under assault, including from the Trump administration in the US. She said, “Everything that Trump has done is not geared toward the general populace at all, and we're the ones who are suffering, we're the ones paying for it, and they're just kind of standing on us saying, 'Whatever.' They don't care, they just don't care, but if you were to put one of them in our shoes and have them deal with what we deal with day-to-day, they would not know what to do. They would not be able to handle it.”

THE ENTIRE REASON WE HAVE OPEN BORDERS IS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED.

70% OF ALL ILLEGALS END UP ON WELFARE

The Seattle Minimum Wage Study Is Utter B.S.

http://fortune.com/2017/06/27/seattle-minimum-wage-study-results-impact-15-dollar-uw/

Josh Hoxie

4:45 PM ET

For decades, conservative ideologues have insisted that raising the minimum wage will hurt, not help, low-wage workers. Mandating higher wages will cost jobs, the old canard goes, and the obvious solution is to let the free market function unfettered.

This argument received a significant bump from a recent study by the University of Washington (UW) looking at the impact of the minimum wage increase in Seattle, where in 2014 the city council voted to phase in a $15 wage over the next few years.

The UW study appeared to show that the 2015–2016 wage floor increase from $11 to $13 per hour, one phase on that journey to $15, caused low-wage workers’ annual pay to go down, not up, and overall low-wage jobs to also go down.

Free-market fanatics around the country flung praise at the study, and serious publications like the Washington Post deemed it “very credible.” But fortunately for working people, it turns out the study’s findings are far from that.

RELATED

MINIMUM WAGEA New Study Has Some Bad News for Backers of a Minimum Wage Hike

The research has significant flaws—most glaringly that its data excludes 40% of the Seattle workforce. It also stands in contrast to a massive trove of actually credible studies showing that raising the minimum wage is a boon for working class families and the communities they live in.

For instance, a team led by Michael Reich, an economics professor at University of California-Berkeley, looked at the impact of the Seattle wage increase on the food industry over the same period and found that wages did in fact go up for restaurant workers, and that employment wasn't affected. These findings were, they claim, “in line with the lion’s share of results in previous credible minimum wage studies.”

Reich and his colleagues have done a significant portion of this research , recently studying cities with the highest minimum wage laws in the country, including Chicago, San Francisco, and Oakland. They've consistently found that higher wages boost worker pay and haven't led to either job loss or a slowdown in economic growth.

Employers see big benefits, too. Workers stay on the job longer, reducing turnover and training costs. They’re also significantly more productive, according to researchers studying wage increases in the United Kingdom.

There are big benefits for broader society as well. Poverty goes down, as does reliance on public assistance programs—one of the few things both Democrats and Republicans can agree is a net positive. Also improved are infant health and adult mental health outcomes, including a significant reduction in depression. (At a time when one in six Americans pops an anti-depressant every day, this seems particularly important.)

If so much research shows significantly raising the minimum wage has a major net-positive impact, what’s the story with the UW study?

One of the major limitations of the study, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) points out, is that the data it analyzed excluded business with multiple locations, such as chain restaurants and big box retailers. So the 40% of employees they left out work at places like McDonald's, Best Buy, and other stores that rely heavily on the low-wage workers who got the actual boost. That is a highly significant oversight.

The UW study also draws what the EPI calls "implausible findings." Since high-paying jobs went up during the period that low-paying jobs went down, the study implies that the minimum wage hike created better jobs for the rich at the expense of the poor. But this explanation fails to take into account the overall robustness and gentrification of Seattle's economy—a much more reasonable explanation for the disparity.

Given these flaws, it's no wonder that UW's findings diverge greatly from the broader body of research on this topic, much of which the UW researchers themselves cite.

Raising the minimum wage—at the city, state, or federal level, where it remains an unlivable $7.25 an hour—is still a reliable solution to the scourge of inequality. Research should continue to look critically at its impact, but so far the only credible research gives the policy a big thumps up.

Josh Hoxie is director of the Project on Opportunity and Taxation at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-editor of Inequality.org.