Crying at work is the new normal

I'd love it if it were possible to boycott the omnipotent leviathan that Amazon has become but I think maybe the better path would be to take some sort of state action against these kinds of abuses.

Employees who spoke with Business Insider said the walks have instilled fear across every department of Whole Foods’ stores.

“I wake up in the middle of the night from nightmares about maps and inventory, and when regional leadership is going to come in and see one thing wrong, and fail the team,” a supervisor at a West Coast Whole Foods said. “The stress has created such a tense working environment. Seeing someone cry at work is becoming normal.”

The maps this employee referenced are diagrams drawn up by Whole Foods’ corporate office that dictate where every item in the store should be placed.

“The fear of chastisement, punishment, and retribution is very real and pervasive,” another worker said.

Of course that's also not likely to happen. Last I checked our elected representatives were bending over backwards to subsidize the behemoth with public funds.

Florida said he admires Amazon as a company and believes some incentives for tech jobs can be a good idea. But he said research suggests that offering big subsidies to large companies rarely drives economic growth, and Florida worries that a new precedent is being set, one in which public officials feel obliged to hand over increasingly larger magnitudes of money to corporations.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) has proposed $5 billion in incentives, while New Jersey has offered a reported $7 billion subsidy deal to bring the company to Newark. Other cities and states have yet to make public their bids; they could be offering even more. Hogan called the Amazon project “the single greatest economic development opportunity in a generation,” for its potential to bring a Fortune 100 corporate nameplate, high-paying jobs and economic growth to the state.

“The level of incentives that some communities were talking about were overdoing it and not fiscally prudent,” Florida said. “Even worse, I was worried that the Amazon search was signaling to the environment that megadeals and megadeal competition is the new normal.”

As usual, Richard Florida is behind the curve. Public bribes to billionaires isn't the "new normal." It's just normal. Your so called progressive local politicians are likely to call it economic development. LaToya Cantrell's recent campaign for mayor centered around her enthusiasm for offering "incentives" to developers and employers like Amazon. She was quick to tout her role in facilitating the much publicized package handed over to DXC recently. It's not clear just how involved she actually was in that. But her eagerness to take credit tells you something about just how normal it is for your representatives to do these deals with the devil.

And, yeah, Amazon is definitely the devil. 

Companies love using the latest and greatest technology to keep track of employees, even when they’re at home. But Amazon’s new idea goes to extremes to treat employees like fleshy robots. The Seattle-based company was just granted two patents for employee wristbands that look like something from dystopian science fiction.

The two new patents, first spotted by Geekwire, are for wristbands that track where a given warehouse workers’ hands are at all times. You read that correctly. I have seen the future, and it’s just rows and rows of low-paid workers in endless warehouses being told to stop picking their noses. Or to get back from their bathroom break, as it were.

People want to let this company fix health care now too.  Sounds like a fantastic idea.