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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.
Oh, is your employer the one that held a food drive for you because you wouldn't have enough food for thanksgiving with the shitty pay you get, or was that a different wal-mart?
Also, I don't own a kindle, and I'm aware of, and try to avoid the modern slavery in electronics production.
Why would you two trade families when you can get married and have the worst of both worlds at the same time?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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...
Hell comes to your house, one box at a time!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The gear they're using sounds like a very primitive precursor to the headsets from Manna...which are already very close to completely possible. Just some Google Glass units and the rest is software (where the difficulty lies, in object recognition of course).
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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.
In-Laws: because we're not happy unless you're not happy.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
And then they eat the steak, well-cooked by the straw-fueled flames.
Thanksgiving: It's like the /. comments, but with turkey.
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.
To be fair Thatcher tripled unemployment, introduced student loans, sold nationalised industries off for peanuts (and no, the service isn't better or cheaper, See: BT, British Gas etc.), allowed foreign companies to take over much of what was left, treated whole swathes of the country like shit, allowed councils to sell off school playing fields to property developers and, well, created that whole property-owning landlord monster class who is still fucking over the masses & means a typical house the size of a matchbox in the UK costs more than a middle-class home in the US.
And while we're at it she presided over a cover-up concerning Hillsborough, a cover-up over police actions during the Miner's Strike and was best pals with England's most famous TV presenting paedophile rapist - Jimmy Savile (actually demanding he should be Knighted by the Queen).
There's a lot more that can be said about Mrs T. Sure, she didn't outsource to Eastern Europe (no one did then - Cold War and all that). However, she was meant to be 'tough' on immigration while the inner-cities filled up with all manner of immigrants. Yeah, I know many down South still love her, but much of the rest of the country see her as someone who did more to kill the social fabric of Britain than the Germans in WW2.
As for the BBC, you do know many of its top staff are Conservative supporters don't you? Since the coalition got in the BBC has bent over backwards to push a right-wing agenda (including those numerous God-awful 'Oh look at all the benefit scroungers' documentaries). They also appear to act as a job agency for failed Tory MPs who litter its programmes. The BBC is and always has been the Establishment. Sad really.
Amazon is working on it, it is just a matter of time.
Yes, it's really amazing we haven't yet declared ourselves mentally ill, for putting people first. I mean, really -- minimum wages? Food and shelter? Safety regulations? Non-discrimination in the workplace? Civil rights? Healthcare? Are we nuts?!?
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?
I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave, By Mac McClelland, March/April 2012 Issue, Mother Jones.
"My brief, backbreaking, rage-inducing, low-paying, dildo-packing time inside the online-shipping machine."
"My liberal family members are hypocrites, therefore all liberals are hypocrites"
Your conservative reasoning is awesome.
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.