I don't believe my office is my family, but I expect to at least be treated with a baseline level of decency, civility, dignity, respect, and kindness, which are non-monetary and (by my reading of your post) unnecessary in your office full of Vulcans.
The fact that these things are seen as optional and unimportant explains a lot of what's happened to public discourse.
It's not a binary between "we are family" and "we are resources", it's a spectrum.
In your case, yes, you were absolutely a resource. This is exactly why companies of that size simply shouldn't exist - because they cannot not treat their employees as resources, with all the inhumanity this implies.
Yes because a small company could deliver a national same day shipping infrastructure and worldwide network of cloud servers including its own undersead cables.
And again, work is a transaction. I’m perfectly fine with being treated as a resource when I was getting a quarter million a year and working remotely…
I'm okay with not having same day shipping if this means that companies don't have to treat their employees like dirt.
But, more importantly, a company that large is simply too much concentrated economic power (which then translates to political power). Even if it was all just robots, I'd still say no. Our political system is in shambles in large part because of these kinds of entities.
So exactly what “power” does Amazon have over your life?
Our politics is in shambles because of religious nutcases, anti science, anti intellectuals, who are afraid of the country becoming majority-minority and straight out racism and bitterness.
It's older than 20 years, but not needing to collect sales tax was definitely a big benefit for Amazon (and other ecommerce providers) and presumably involved lobbying to keep it for as long as possible.
That wasn’t based on lobbying, it was the law at first and Amazon took advantage of it.
Amazon didn’t have any significant lobbying 20 years ago and it definitely was the behemoth it is today. That being said, even today it isn’t as large as Walmart and was definitely not a large retailer back then.
It was seriously in doubt 20 years ago whether Amazon would ever survive and definitely wasn’t consistently profitable.
Therefore, let's throw everything non-monetary under the bus because work should be purely transactional?
What else should it be? Do you believe that your company is like “your family”? Your coworkers or especially your manager are “your friends”?
Why else do you go to work?
I don't believe my office is my family, but I expect to at least be treated with a baseline level of decency, civility, dignity, respect, and kindness, which are non-monetary and (by my reading of your post) unnecessary in your office full of Vulcans.
The fact that these things are seen as optional and unimportant explains a lot of what's happened to public discourse.
Was it indecent for Google to lay someone off, remove all access and give him 16 weeks of severance + two additional weeks for each year of service?
I didn't say anything about Google.
The submitted article was about Google…
You're taking "Human resources" a bit too literally.
We are resources. The one Big Tech company I have worked for has 1.556 million employees. What else was I besides a “resource”?
It's not a binary between "we are family" and "we are resources", it's a spectrum.
In your case, yes, you were absolutely a resource. This is exactly why companies of that size simply shouldn't exist - because they cannot not treat their employees as resources, with all the inhumanity this implies.
Yes because a small company could deliver a national same day shipping infrastructure and worldwide network of cloud servers including its own undersead cables.
And again, work is a transaction. I’m perfectly fine with being treated as a resource when I was getting a quarter million a year and working remotely…
I'm okay with not having same day shipping if this means that companies don't have to treat their employees like dirt.
But, more importantly, a company that large is simply too much concentrated economic power (which then translates to political power). Even if it was all just robots, I'd still say no. Our political system is in shambles in large part because of these kinds of entities.
So exactly what “power” does Amazon have over your life?
Our politics is in shambles because of religious nutcases, anti science, anti intellectuals, who are afraid of the country becoming majority-minority and straight out racism and bitterness.
Amazon has nothing to do with that.
You can literally just punch "Amazon lobbying" into Google and get pages of results.
Okay? Name one policy that the current administration has done that helps Amazon?
I didn't say anything about "current administration", so I don't know why you think that is relevant.
Okay, name one law that was passed during the pass 20 years as a result of Amazon’s lobbying that was favorable to Amazon?
It's older than 20 years, but not needing to collect sales tax was definitely a big benefit for Amazon (and other ecommerce providers) and presumably involved lobbying to keep it for as long as possible.
That wasn’t based on lobbying, it was the law at first and Amazon took advantage of it.
Amazon didn’t have any significant lobbying 20 years ago and it definitely was the behemoth it is today. That being said, even today it isn’t as large as Walmart and was definitely not a large retailer back then.
It was seriously in doubt 20 years ago whether Amazon would ever survive and definitely wasn’t consistently profitable.
Totally, I completely agree that they didn't lobby for the original exemption.
However, I would be very surprised if they weren't lobbying heavily to keep said exemption for as long as possible.