Amazon Employees Are Quitting at Twice the Rate of Recent Years (businessinsider.com) 55
A growing number of employees Amazon doesn't want to lose are leaving the company, according to a report. Insider: An internally tracked metric, called "regretted" attrition, has reached an average of 12.1% since June 2021, more than double the average in recent years, according to internal data obtained by Insider. That number had hovered around 5% from 2016 to mid-2021, the data shows. Regretted attrition is the portion of employees Amazon didn't want to see leave, typically through voluntary departures. Separately, Amazon closely follows another metric called "unregretted" attrition, which represents employees it's not afraid to lose, as Insider previously reported. [...] The spike in Amazon's regretted attrition is one of the many fallouts of rising inflation, as wage inflation and competition for talent make it easier for the company's most prized corporate employees to find better opportunities elsewhere. Amazon employees who previously spoke to Insider said the company's relatively low pay, stagnant stock price, and grueling work culture have all contributed to the growing departure rate.
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So no doubt you're in favour of imprisoning those in charge of companies that hire illegal workers. That, after all, is a classic way to undermine the free market.
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Total non-sequitor mush!
Amazon,like any other, are losing employees they don't want to lose along with normal turnover.
So you bring up imprisonment. Why?
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The logic is sound, if the subject is the free market, and things that can interfere with it. Which was the subject that backslashdot addressed.
Treating good employees so badly they quit is bad business, but not illegal. Hiring people who do not have the legal right to work in the US is illegal, and in some cases, criminal.
And those who tout the virtues of the free market while saying things like "we don't need a minimum wage" do, disproportionately, espouse disappointment at things like laws prohibiting t
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Thank you. I was starting to think my writing was the problem, but you understood what some chucklewits didn't.
How desperate can Amazon get for ants? (Score:2)
Why are you feeding a vacuous troll with a vacuous FP and a vacuous Subject? I want to be charitable, so maybe he's just senile or dead. In the second case, the account may have been hacked.
I was going to comment on my own experiences with Amazon, but I think the new Subject actually suffices (and I have to run away now, too).
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People moving to better jobs has.. What to do with minimum wage exactly?
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If we had a minimum wage, starting jobs wouldn't exist. Production of goods will be reduced, and the cost of things will increase. It will cost more to produce something, so that thing that is produced will get made less and also it will cost more.
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An employer not paying staff enough to live off is being subsidized by society, via health care, food stamps, social housing etc. At least with slavery those where provided by the slaver.
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Or subsidized by their parents. I'm so sorry, but if you're still working a minimum wage job as an independent adult you probably need to ask why you're stuck working a job that a teenager should be working.
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Or subsidized by their parents. I'm so sorry, but if you're still working a minimum wage job as an independent adult you probably need to ask why you're stuck working a job that a teenager should be working.
Usually it's because they were working a minimum wage job as a teenager, when they should have been doing their homework instead. Child labor is generally a bad thing.
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Yeah put those lazy adolescents back to work in the coal mines! That will make them into men.
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But this isn't a new phenomenon. Children have always worked. Whether it was delivering newspapers or shoveling out the stable, kids worked before and/or after school. My father set pins at a bowling alley when he was 14 (this was before they had machines to do the job). He ended up an electrical engineer.
People who are smart enough to become an electrical engineer are likely to be able to succeed no matter what. The folks at the bottom intellectually are likely to not do well no matter what. But the folks in the middle, when faced with the much steeper science/math/tech requirements for jobs that pay well these days, are more adversely affected by working.
It's only the current generation that is too, um, fragile, to handle working AND getting an education AND paying off their own damn student loans, as their parents and grandparents did.
I suspect it has less to do with young people being more fragile and more to do with cash-strapped employers acting like bigger a**holes. Back in the d
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Ah yes. Straight from the same school where trickle down economics came from.
It's always amusing how the US somehow manages to have a completely different understanding of economics to the rest of the western world.
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It's always amusing how the US somehow manages to have a completely different understanding of economics to the rest of the western world.
While simultaneously having the biggest and most robust economy of any country in the world.
Amusing, indeed.
Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)
There should be absolutely no minimum wage. Employers offer a job, a stated wage, take it or leave it. Perfect. Free market. No collective bargaining, no unions, each person decides whether or not the pay is worth the pain of doing the job.
But it needs to be an exchange between equals. If the choice to the employee is, "Take this piss poor pay, or else you starve" is not really a fair exchange between equal players. So this is the deal: We provide basic food, shelter and healthcare for ALL people regardless of income, wealth or ability to work. And we will pay in cash. The employees will not be under any pressure to work. They are the citizens of the country. The own their share of all the collective property of the United States of America. All the minerals extracted, all the frequency allocated, all the rights of way granted all belong to all of us equally and we all get a basic royalty for it.
Then it is up to the employers to offer a wage that is attractive enough for our free citizens to work.
Who is going to pay for it? The corporations will pay for it. These corporations exist because we the people allowed it to exist. The corporations can pass profits and assets to the owners but stop the losses and liabilities. This special treatment is something we collectively gave those corporations. In return the corporations have to pay us enough to maintain a basic standard of living for all.
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A true fiscal conservative would support such an approach.
I don't believe I've ever met a true fiscal conservative who would support communism. Perhaps where you live gets their true fiscal conservatives from a different catalog then where I live.
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Should a 'true fiscal conservative' favour free-market economics? This proposal implements them. Without equal access to the market, you don't have free market economics. This gives everyone equal access - whether they then sink or swim is down to their own endeavours.
The labels, 'conservative' 'communist', have become the problem. They are little more than slurs to throw around now, with little agreed-upon meaning. We need to evaluate proposals without using them.
Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)
No collective bargaining for the workers, you mean. Corporations are always bargaining from the position of being a collective, so to speak. (except for small, single-owner companies)
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I was on-board with your initial statement and then it just fell apart.
You're right in the fact a "minimum wage" is unnecessary. If you look at the U.S. Board of Labor statistics, you'll see it's only a very small percentage of people who earn it in the first place. That, alone, illustrates how the vast majority are expecting/getting more than the government mandated minimum, despite no government laws forcing that to happen. (There's no Federal or State law ordering a company to hand out raises at any spe
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" NOT what America was designed for."
It's kind of funny to pull that line out, when America was 'designed' it didn't actually have significant corporations, until the industrial revolution in the 20s. And the corporations of their day lived by vastly different rules. Nobody has lived in whatever America you think the founders designed for over a century.
" Employers can't and won't suddenly say, "Hey... no more mandated minimum wage? Cool ... I'm dropping all my wages to 10 cents an hour!"
Now THAT's the stra
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WRT to your "exchange between equals", I'm all for market wages, however, that also means employers can't go petition congress to increase immigration to generate additional labor supply. If labor has to abide by fixed supply and demand, business has to abide by fixed supply and demand. So if nobody wants a job at $16/hr, business can't claim labor shortage and ask to let Joe in on a visa to take that job, instead they need to offer $20, $50, $100, etc until someone agrees to take that job.
I don't think that's going to happen (Score:2)
I get what you're doing, you're trying to make a society where everyone gets to be an individual. But humans don't work like that. We're a social species. We do our best work when we're together.
So we need a minimum wage. Not necessarily a dollar amount though. The Netherlands has no minimum wage... but everyone belongs to a Union. If you don't have one
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Wouldn't that universal basic income be in effect a minimum wage? It would just be one you get whether you work or not. Then if you want more money you can get a job.
Scotty P would be the best manager (Score:2, Insightful)
He's got that No Ragrets tattoo
Not Just an Amazon Problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Companies everywhere are seeing much higher than normal attrition. The main driver is simply very low unemployment. There are a lot more job openings than there are qualified people to fill them.
That means that employers that really need to hire are offering much higher salaries and casting wide nets for hiring. For individual employees, that means they can likely get a much higher salary or a promotion (or both) by switching companies. But employers are loathe to give big raises to their existing employees because they are desperately trying to keep costs down in the face of high inflation. So the end result is a lot of people moving.
Split AWS into its own entity (Score:3)
I can't think of any legit reason for AWS to be run by the same people who are concerned with warehouse and delivery logistics. I for one would feel a whole lot safer about keeping my eggs in the AWS basket if they weren't joined at the hip.
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Couldn't agree more. I have a feeling even Amazon is considering this move and positioning itself so it's at least a viable option? (When I was working for them, my first paychecks came from Amazon but later, they changed payroll around so we were actually paid by AWS.)
My guess (at least based on rumors I heard) is that AWS generates the lion's share of profits for their company, and it's been useful to use some of the AWS income to fund expansion on the Amazon delivery/logistics side of things? By keeping
Good? (Score:4, Informative)
This is how capitalism and employees is supposed to work.
There is UNBELIEVABLE demand for workers in the US. Businesses all over the country are short-staffed, short-services, or simply closed because they can't find people.
If you have a shitty job whose pay doesn't offset the shittiness, then you LEAVE and get a BETTER job.
That company is then forced to either
- improve treatment/pay
- scale back operations to the level they can support with more tolerant workers.
This really isn't that complicated.
So there's two things going on here (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words these businesses are relying on subsidies of one kind or another in order to have a functioning workforce. They need these two groups because there's subsidized either by retirement savings and social security or by parents still chipping in a little here and there.
Without those subsidies the employees can't be functional. They have too many problems in there personal lives. Basically these low pay businesses are welfare Queens
So let's take a gander at American demographics. Birth rates have been plummeting for well over 40 years meaning we're running out of teenagers. The pandemic has over a million confirmed kills and is a million excess deaths that if we are being honest or related to the pandemic. To say nothing about bunch of old people who aren't going to go work in a customer service job and risk their lives.
So if you're a business that relies on exploitative labor and low pay you just lost your two major sources of it. It's no wonder Amazon, which is very much one of the businesses given how hard they work their employees, is having a hard time keeping people.. it's also why we're seeing Starbucks unionized.
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But MAGA and Trump and the open hostility to immigrants is already having a huge impact on quality of immigrants from India. Till 1965 there were no significant immigration from India. After 1965 reform of immigration laws, Apollo program and doctor shortage of 1960s created the first wave of highly educated doctors and engineers. With good English medium education, history of science and tec
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Immigration won't fix birth rates (Score:2)
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All my agricultural land owning relatives sold off land to real est
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I don't think you're completely wrong... but I don't think it really accounts for the whole labor shortage we're seeing now, either.
For starters, companies like Amazon never really hired large numbers of teenagers OR retirees. Most of its labor counts on young adults. Your delivery drivers and warehouse packers and loaders are going to consist of a lot of people in their early 20's through late 30's. And even for corporate office staff, you see a similar trend. For those jobs, Amazon puts people through pr
Most of their labor are young adults (Score:2)
One of the problems we have is that as a nation we only think about things when money changes hands between companies or employees. There are thousands of different ways th
Good for amazon (Score:2)
As per Jeff Bezos' own newspaper, amanon employed way too many warehouse workers during the pandemic:
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
And just yesterday, Bloomberg reported that amazon had way too much warehouse space, and wanted to sublet, or end leaes...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news... [bloomberg.com]
So, for them people quiting (as opposed to get fired) is a solution to a problem, without the negative publicity derived from mass redundancies.
Yes, many of the people leaving are the most capable, but according to the cosm
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I think you missed the "regretted attrition" part of the article, these are people Amazon absolutely does not want to lose.
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I think you missed the "regretted attrition" part of the article, these are people Amazon absolutely does not want to lose.
No, I did not. That's why I said:
"Yes, many of the people leaving are the most capable"
Even their own employees say they are horrible (Score:3)
I talked with a logistics manager months ago and they were contemplating leaving. They had to work long hours and the worked sucked, they didn't get hardly any vacation because the company structure made it hard to leave. I don't know why anyone would work for Bezos. He's rich because he makes sure the wealth goes to to the top and overworking employees. If that guy would take a 10% paycut, he could probably double everyone elses salary.
Re: Even their own employees say they are horrible (Score:1)
So much for fixing their corporate culture (Score:2)
But compared to other employers? (Score:2)
People are finding new jobs like crazy everywhere.
Not saying that people aren't specifically leaving Amazon for personal reasons, but this doesn't tell us if it's really a problem with Amazon since this is happening everywhere. What comparisons have the journalists performed with the market in general? Or is this just an anti-Amazon piece?
A standard metric (Score:2)
By putting the term in quotes, the author of the summary implies that he/she has never heard of the metric. However, regrettable attrition has been tracked at every company I’ve ever been a part of. Nobody really cares if your low performer leaves; they’re easy enough to replace. It’s when the number of your stars, or even your good-just-not-great people walk out the door, increase that you want to be aware of the trend and take action.
This is happening everywhere (Score:2)