As I was going through my plans for a post this week, I realized a great one had already been written. My company promotes our employees both internally and externally. They shine a positive spotlight on my team mates and I wanted to highlight someone I work with everyday.
Fast fashion may be on its last legs. Take it from H&M, which was forced to admit in its March financial report that it had $4.3 billion of unsold inventory left hanging on its racks, along with a massive drop in sales. In fact, the Swedish company has started incinerating clothes in power plants to generate energy. When you consider all of the raw materials, chemical pollution, human labor, and transportation costs required to make just a single shirt, the scale of the waste is astounding.
Brands may seem impervious to complaints, negative press and exposés, but the operative word is ‘seems’, as Ivanka Trump learned when she was forced to shut down her fashion line.
The business seemed to be floundering: One source found that online sales of Ivanka Trump products sold on Amazon, Macy’s, Bloomingdales, and Zappos fell nearly 55% over the last year. (…) The brand was the target of a massive boycott, spearheaded by Grab Your Wallet, a movement urging people to protest the Trump family’s ethical violations by refusing to shop with retailers selling their brands.
The article made me wonder if the same approach could affect Amazon, the 8 thousand pound gorilla of ecommerce
Today (Oct. 2), he announced that he will be raising the minimum wages for his e-commerce company’s US workers to $15 an hour, a move that will affect 250,000 full-time employees and 100,000 seasonal workers.
Yes, and while it looks like a big deal, it was more in the line of self-preservation.
Earning $15 an hour isn’t likely to impress Amazon’s Prime customers, who mostly earn far more (it takes 8 hours of very hard work to pay for Prime).
For Amazon, paying third-party companies to deliver packages is a cost-effective alternative to providing full employment. And the speed of two-day shipping is great for consumers. But delivering that many packages isn’t easy, and the job is riddled with problems, (…) Others, including several labor experts, said they felt blame should be placed with Amazon, adding that the company was pressuring courier companies to deliver more, faster. They said Amazon was profiting off cheap labor that it doesn’t have to protect because it’s outsourcing the job to companies that it doesn’t adequately supervise.
Read the article and you’ll see conditions similar, maybe worse, to those that have led to protests, boycotts and change when they’ve happen on production lines overseas.
Amazon’s response is typical.
“We have worked with our partners, listened to their needs, and have implemented new programs to ensure small delivery businesses serving Amazon customers have the tools they need to deliver a great customer and employee experience.”
Nothing about driver experience.
The problem has nothing to do with Bezos’ wealth, he earned that, and everything to do with Amazon using it’s savvy, backed by it’s power, to change the game.
So how do you get the attention of an 8 thousand pound gorilla?
The same way consumers moved the fashion industry — money.
Think of the effect if just 20% (or more) of the 100 million paying Prime members bought just two items a month from a different merchant.
There’s no question that would get Amazon’s attention.
As set out by The Next Web, the bulk of the criticism lies in the decision to reinvent Skype as a social-first app. Skype’s old focus on chats, calls and professional communication has been dropped in favour of building an all-out Snapchat clone for younger users.
No wonder I didn’t understand. I’ve never used Snapchat and certainly don’t qualify as a “younger user.”
Sadly, none of the updates since then have fixed anything.
You would think Microsoft would have at least some respect for their business users.
The reasoning and the action is what I would have expected from Steve Ballmer, but not from Satya Nadella.
If nothing else, you’d think they might, at least, have heard the adage “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.”
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here
Being a woman in tech can be a serious drawback in 2015; far more so than in the 1980s and 90s — Tinder even dumped a woman founder on the basis that the company wouldn’t be taken seriously by investors. Sadly, they may have been right.
Leave it to Slack, valued at $2.8 billion, to do things differently.
According to its diversity report released on Wednesday, 45% of all Slack managers are female, with 41% of the entire workforce having a woman as their manager. “This means that 41% of our people report to a woman who helps set their priorities, measure their performance, mentor them in their work, and who make recommendations that will impact their compensation and career growth.” In non-engineering positions, 51% of the workforce turned out to be female. Out of the roughly 250 employees worldwide, 39% are reported to be female.
Slack is considered the fastest growing software company in history and they certainly lead the tech pack In gender diversity.
And while their racial diversity stats are as dismal as the rest of tech they are far more actively working on changing that, too.
Here are the company’s four hiring guidelines,
Examining all decisions regarding hiring/recruiting, promotion, compensation, employee recognition and management structure to ensure that we are not inadvertently advantaging one group over another.
Working with expert advisors and employees to build fair and inclusive processes for employee retention, such as effective management education, company-wide unconscious bias training, ally skills coaching, and compensation review.
Helping to address the pipeline issue with financial contributions to organizations whose mission is to educate and equip underrepresented groups with relevant technical skills (like Hack the Hood and Grace Hopper), as well as supporting a variety of internship programs to broaden access to opportunity (like CODE2040).
Attempting to be conscious and deliberate in our decision-making and the principles and values by which we operate. Changing our industry starts by building a workplace that is welcoming to all so that a generation of role models, examples and mentors is created.
Slack is practicing what recent studies have proven; hiring women pays.
Give that some thought the next time your unconscious bias kicks in leading you to reject a candidate because she is a she.
Yesterday was election day of course and it was a doozie. I live in Florida and have found that it can be a bizarre state to reside in when it comes to election time.
Like most states there is a rural and urban voting divide. However, this state seems to be fairly even on that split and that results in extremely close elections.
I looked at past data for the state and it looks like 75% of eligible voters vote in the general election and around 50% vote in midterms. I am not sure what drives those numbers, but the election always comes down to less than 100,000 vote difference.
In Florida we are inundated with ads, money and agendas. I am registered independent (thinking it would spare me from phone calls, which it didn’t) and I received calls from campaigns, dozens of text messages and countless mailers.
I tend to tune it all out. I go search the info on the candidates and make a rational decision well before the election. However, I have found that Florida is anything but rational.
Depending on your leanings you believe your guns will be taken, socialist are getting elected, migrants are being rounded up and so on. It seems that only the extreme version of both parties is presented to the public. What is funny though is when you actually listen to the candidates themselves they all seem fairly rational.
What drives us to our political camps? I know for me it was family initially; they all voted a certain way and so did I.
As I have come into my own I have learned to evaluate a candidate on their merits. Not by party or ads. Work and friends are another way. I am in tech and in an urban center. Most of my population is more left. As a result I tend to think most feel the same way. I could not be more wrong. Even in my county when you go to different areas you see a change in mentality.
Where else do you find the influence comes from? Religion and faith can drive it. Education of course. Income. I don’t have one answer but it’s obvious that it’s a cultural driver.
Now that the election is over maybe we can reach across the fence and begin mending it.
We are all in this together and have different ideas on how to get things done, but we gave value as humans.
An identical study was published by YouGov UK last week, and comparing the results reveals that the stereotype of Britons being less enthusiastic generally holds up – except for the very most positive words.
For the 31 words that scored below 8/10 in both countries, Britons gave 28 of them a lower average score than Americans did. However, for the nine highest ranked words Britons rated eight of them more positively.
I’ve written before on the lessons learned from those who ignored the differences.
As a wordsmith myself, I hope this information proves useful to you when you’re crafting your next message — or at the least provides food for thought.
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
Tomorrow is the most important election in my lifetime. I grew up a target of hate and discrimination and this election will forecast whether I’ll die in a reincarnation of that world.
Tomorrow Americans will choose between inclusion and bigotry; between acceptance and hate.
The conventions may be over, but the rhetoric is still going strong. Did you know it’s a requirement
for politicians to have a PhD—which stands for “piled higher and deeper”— and that’s no bull. Adams and Lincoln never qualified as politicians, but both made it as statesmen.
Ambrose Bierce starts us out with a wonderful definition of politics, just so we’re all on the same page.
Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
Over the years I’ve read many descriptions of politicians and Congress, but John Adams provided my favorite.
In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm and three or more is a congress
The next quote is from Lincoln.
Republicans are for both the man and the dollar, but in case of conflict the man before the dollar.
But times have changed and it would be more accurate to say, “Republicans are for both the man and the dollar, but in case of conflict the dollar before the man.” Of course, it applies just as easily to Democrats.
Andy Borowitz offers our final insight today. I don’t know for sure when he said it, but it’s been applicable since before I could vote.
It would be nice to spend billions on schools and roads, but right now that money is desperately needed for political ads.
(Did you miss the first two I Hate Politics? You can see them here and here.)
A question was posted on Quora after the last election explaining that the poster had voted for Trump as a joke, was horrified that he’d won and asked how he could change his vote.
That level of ignorance seems well beyond what Socrates had in mind in his comments on voters.
And the image below is meant as a graphic argument against the belief some people have that their single vote doesn’t count for much.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
