Last year, only a third of Amazon’s new hires stayed with the company for more than 90 days before quitting, being fired, or getting laid off
The report, which is based off internal research papers, slide decks, and spreadsheets from Amazon, claims that workers are twice as likely to leave by choice, rather than because they were laid off or fired. It also says that the issue is widespread throughout the company, not just with warehouse workers; from entry level roles all the way up to vice presidents, the lowest attrition rate for one of the company’s 10 tiers of employees was almost 70 percent, with the highest reaching a staggering 81.3 percent.
This happens in Parable of the Sower. Eventually people are required to accept a job for room and board, and no cash payment.
It’s one of my favorite books. I think it’s the perfect parable for the need to move beyond the affinity group as an organizational form. On the one hand it’s about the evolution of a movement after a catastrophic defeat, on the other hand it’s the deeply human story of a grieving mother and the bitter child of a prodigy, on the third hand it’s a rip-roaring action-adventure where half the conflicts end in tense gun battles and the other half end in emotional dialogue. Very few authors make characters as rich and believable as Butler conjures in a few pages to serve some allegorical point.
The level of sexual violence is excessive but its not gratuitous or exploitative in the same way as so many awful male writers; there’s no perverse sadism or sexual satisfaction for the writer or the reader. I have difficulty with depictions of violence in media, and especially with characters who are so emotionally real to me as the ones in Talents so definitely recommend not reading it if you are not in the right headspace for that.
(Abstract Spoilers) Finally, while so much of the conflict and organizational struggles is realistic and instructive in the first book and the first half of the second, I do not find the model of change to be very believable. In the end, there is so no grand conflict with the state. Despite all the repression acorn faced, Lauren’s movement is allowed to gradually outgrow patriarchal capitalism and never enters into a grand confrontation. Ultimately, this is not as important as all of the other themes and it would be entitled to wish the book to redo ‘10 Days that Shook the World’ in the third act so this is a minor complaint.
Read the book! Read the book! Read the book!
Really good breakdown of a lot of my thoughts as well! I’ve really enjoyed everything I’ve read of Butler’s. I had a little difficulty with Talents the first time I read it since coming off of Sower I was anticipating/expecting a grand conflict that didn’t really arise, and it took additional reads to appreciate more of the other themes.
I sometimes find myself a little frustrated with some modern SF that is marketed as being very diverse, when it tries to represent older SF as lacking any perspectives beyond the male, white, hetero norm that (to be fair) many of the dominant authors represented. But like… what about Butler, Tiptree, Delany, Le Guin, Tepper, etc etc etc? These are some of the best SF writers ever! But I guess it’s not the marketing departments job to tell people to go find a used copy of an out of print novel that’s probably better than the book they’re trying to sell…
