Slashdot Mirror
BBC: Amazon Workers Face "Increased Risk of Mental Illness"
Rambo Tribble writes "The BBC is reporting that an investigation into a UK-based Amazon facility has uncovered conditions that experts believe foster mental illness. At the root of the problem seems to be unreasonable performance expectations combined with a fundamentally dehumanizing environment. From the article: 'Amazon said that official safety inspections had not raised any concerns and that an independent expert appointed by the company advised that the picking job is "similar to jobs in many other industries and does not increase the risk of mental and physical illness."'"
Working at hopelessly automated amazon warehouses where you are treated as a physical automaton with no free will is "similar to" working in a traditional warehouse in the same way ozone is "similar to" O2. It's made of roughly the same thing, but isn't exactly good for you.
This Thanksgiving I am going to hear from all of my pro-union family members about how evil Walmart (my employer) is, and how they treat their employees. All the while comparing books they are reading on their Kindles and shopping for Kindle Fires for their kids.
Liberals are so awesomely hypocritical.
A BBC investigation into a UK-based Amazon warehouse has found conditions that a stress expert said could cause "mental and physical illness".
Well, that settles it.
Generalizations aren't going to do much. Some conservatives are much the same.
I once accidentally worked for the US Postal Service for a year and a half and my job involved walking that much every shift; I must say that I was probably at my best physical shape of my life outside of military service...
It turned into a liberal vs conservative issue because those who aren't in favour of workers not being made ill by their work needed a way to justify that, and therefore did their best to associate it with what's commonly seen as an extreme, and slightly insane political affiliation. They then burned this straw political affiliation man at the steak to demonstrate how dumb it was to support the idea of workers not being made ill by their work.
Problem is that robots are already waiting in the wings ... Amazon pickers have only a couple years of job left as it is (unless minimum wage craters faster than robots get cheaper, at third world wages they can outcompete robots for a few years longer ... hard to see who will be left to consume though). If they unionise robots will take over faster.
I wouldn't class stress or depression as a mental illness, it is a physical one.
AC, at least the BBC have the balls to do this, unlike other commercial broadcasters.
Any gains in efficiency never result in less work or more vacation time... it results in layoffs and cost cutting to be more competitive and increase margins, which in turn forces other companies to do the same thing. Combine that with globalization, it's a race to the bottom.
Yes, that was my first thought when reading the article.
And since you did not provide a link here is one for people wondering what we are talking about.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
just started reading from that link and then I found this paragraph in the story:
Ultimately, you would expect that there would be riots across America. But the people could not riot. The terrorist scares at the beginning of the century had caused a number of important changes. Eventually, there were video security cameras and microphones covering and recording nearly every square inch of public space in America. There were taps on all phone conversations and Internet messages sniffing for terrorist clues. If anyone thought about starting a protest rally or a riot, or discussed any form of civil disobedience with anyone else, he was branded a terrorist and preemptively put in jail. Combine that with robotic security forces, and riots are impossible.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Yeah, an organisation run by posh people and full of Tory MPs that appears to devote half of its political output to bashing poor people and praising multinational corporations just screams fucking left-wing, doesn't it?
Thanksgiving: It's like the /. comments, but with turkey and alcohol.
Fixed it for you.
Not even alcohol can fix it. Not even alcohol.
I assume that he was simply unused to being on his feet all day or maybe overweight or has badly fitting shoes.
Or maybe...like many if not the vast majority of warehouses, they have hard concrete floors, which are brutal on the feet. The husband of one of my co-workers' works at Home Depot with the concrete floor, he is slim and in good shape, and has tried every orthopedic shoe solution available and still it's problematic. And I know for me personally, I can walk or hike for hours on end without a problem, but more than 30 minutes in a Home Depot or Costco on the concrete floors and my feet and calves are aching.
I worked at the Home Depot for two years, and I never got what you described. I never met one HD worker who complained about chronic foot pain due to hard concrete floors. I trust this observation because we, Home Depot workers always complained about other physical things: like dust from the Building Materials and Flooring departments. Back pains (the company gave us elastic back braces to help with lifting heavy stuff). Incredibly rude customers. Getting our fingers smashed when carrying tiles or concrete blocks or whatever.
We came in all shapes and sizes, male and female. We even had a joke, that whenever we finished our day, we would have been "Home Depot'ed" (beat up to crap by work.) But I never heard people complaining about chronic foot pain from walking 8+ hours on the concrete floor.
I'm not saying that what you describe is false. But it is not something that I ever experienced, or witnessed, when I worked at a Home Depot store.