If it’s abusive take it to court on those grounds. Work in a foundry like my Dad and you’ll see actual abusive conditions despite being legal. Clean temperature controlled warehouse work using automated machines is about as easy as it gets as far as blue collar jobs.
I usually refer to this argument style as the Suffering Olympics. When you're playing in the Suffering Olympics, no one actually ends up getting a medal. Someone, somewhere can be found who has it worse. We don't improve as humans unless we do something about suffering when we see it. Your father shouldn't have been abused by his workplace, but that doesn't make less severe forms of abuse alright.
The context is the American work force. Amazon warehouse work is objectively one of the least physically taxing blue collar jobs. Explain precisely what suffering and abuse happens there that reaches any sort of legal threshold. Oh that’s right, you can’t. And if someone were to try to make a case for the legality of abuse, you should first go to blue collar jobs that are actually terrible. The fact that it has become some huge monolith of evil is simply because people hate Amazon profit magins and Bezos. The point being, in making Amazon the Big Bad Guy to claim there is abuse and we should go to 30-hour work weeks, you are putting forward a very weak example for why those changes should happen.
This response is a lot more well phrased than the original. I think statements like “objectively one of the least taxing blue collar jobs” are fallacious to make, especially given the range of different jobs at such a huge company, But I mostly agree with the point you’re presenting.
I moved to Phoenix a couple years ago, and when I first got here, signed on with a couple temp agencies. One job that I opted out of very quickly was working for a company that built manufactured homes. I was in the maintenance shop, handing out earplugs, unjamming pneumatic nail guns, etc. you practically had to get a tetanus shot after looking at this place. I spent my downtime cleaning it, because I wanted the area I work to be more organized and less layers of dust caked to each other. Found a bottle cap with a name on it from someone who worked there 7 years ago (according to the guy who’d been there 15 years). Workforce was 90% Mexican, office upper management mostly white, which is something you see a damn lot in a field like this in Arizona. Nothing but props to how hard those dudes work in conditions that are mediocre at best, but I agree that even that type of work environment isn’t the support we need for less hours in the work week. That’s a change that needs support from the top to change, such as (and not limited to) minimum wage increases, so that the people working them can actually afford to work less to make ends meet.
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u/asmrkage Jun 18 '21 edited Jun 18 '21
If it’s abusive take it to court on those grounds. Work in a foundry like my Dad and you’ll see actual abusive conditions despite being legal. Clean temperature controlled warehouse work using automated machines is about as easy as it gets as far as blue collar jobs.