Exhausted Amazon Drivers Are Working 11-Hour Shifts For Less Than Minimum Wage (mirror.co.uk)

schwit1 quotes the Daily Mirror: Drivers are being asked to deliver up to 200 parcels a day for Amazon while earning less than the minimum wage, a Sunday Mirror investigation reveals today... Many routinely exceed the legal maximum shift of 11 hours and finish their days dead on their feet. Yet they have so little time for food or toilet stops they snatch hurried meals on the run and urinate into plastic bottles they keep in their vans. They say they often break speed limits to meet targets that take no account of delays such as ice, traffic jams or road closures.

Many claim they are employed in a way that means they have no rights to holiday or sickness pay. And some say they take home as little as £160 for a five-day week amid conditions described by one lawyer as "almost Dickensian"... The Driving and Vehicle Standards Agency has vowed to investigate after drivers contacted them to complain about conditions.

Comments

Re:MAGA

[Anonymous Coward]

Another dipshit who didn't read the summary, let alone the article. It's about Great Britain...asshole

Re:Why is this so cheap?

[MikeDataLink]

Except this article is talking about Amazon in the UK, not the USA. Good job RTFAing...

almost Dickensian

[fahrbot-bot]

Noting that Charles Dickens' works were often so long because he usually got paid by the word. (My wife was an English teacher.)

Re:Why is this so cheap?

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering that Amazon packages are delivered by USPS and UPS in America...yes.

Every Prime package I have received in the past three months or so has been delivered by an Amazon delivery person, and I live in a medium-sized city in the midwest (big enough to have professional sports teams, but nowhere close in size to New York, Chicago, et al). Odds are a carrier like UPS is moving it from the warehouse to the local area, but the delivery to the home does not always use that same service.

I am sure if I order next-day delivery on top of Prime it would come FedEx or UPS, but it appears that Amazon are leveraging their in-house delivery for, at the very least, a non-trivial amount of deliveries.

Re:Why is this so cheap?

[b0s0z0ku]

This is actually about Amazon UK, not USA.

Re:I don't have to ask

[AmiMoJo]

Trumpists still don't seem to have realised that they were fucked over, even as the tax plans hit and all pretence falls away.

Clinton lost because she became part of the false narrative. "You are under attack by liberals, immigrants, the political elite. I'll drain the swamp, build a big wall. Simple solutions to complex problems. I'll lead your revolution against this crook!"

And you got Trump, who doesn't give a shit about you now he has your vote. The plan is to screw you hard, blame someone else and peddle the same lies next election.

Re:THis is why Unions were invented.

[Durrik]

Not only that, there were extreme safety concerns too. It use to be said that you could tell how long a brakeman had been working for the railroad by how many fingers he had left. If he had all of them he was a rookie.

Brakemen use to have to couple the cars together. Even though there were the same sort of couplers that are used today back then the railroads thought it was cheaper to use the old method. The brakeman held a loop of steel between the two cars as they were pushed together and then pulled his hand back at the last second. Then two pins were hammered into place in the couplers to hold the steel loop in place and the cars together. If there were a fraction of a second too slow getting their hands out of the way they lost fingers. The railway unions helped force the railways to go to the then patented automatic couplers. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_coupling#Link_and_pin).

Brakes on the cars were also controlled by those big wheels you see at the top of the cars in the old photos. Going around a corner the brakemen had to apply the brakes to the cars to make sure they didn't derail. And there were never enough brakemen for every car on the train, so they would have to jump between cars on the moving train to apply and release the brakes. Again there was a then patented invention that used air pressure from the engine to trigger the brakes on the cars, again the companies didn't care about human life and focused on profit. The railway unions helped fix that.

The brakemen also had to often run ahead of the train to do the switching. Since switching was another one of those things that could have been automated but didn't. Trains were suppose to stop so that the switching could be done in time and the brakemen get back aboard, but time is money and you know what that means.

There's a reason that the railway owners were called robber barons. And there were a lot of things they did that we would object to, that unions helped to fix.

I am in no way saying that unions are pure and benevolent organizations. Often they're corrupt, and as greedy as the people running the corporations. They have their place, and there are a lot of instances in the 2010s that they should come back. The Amazon story is a good example of it. Uber is another good example. A lot of other areas in high tech could use them too. All of these aren't for wages as the parent to the post said, but for working conditions and safety. When there is too much power in the hands of the employers the employees suffer, and there needs to be a balance.