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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.
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.
Something you will never hear an American ask themselves.
Generally speaking, when you are buying so much "shit" for so much cheaper than the rest of the world, there is a good chance that this is only possible because a lot of people down the line are being fucked.
But hey... cheap tv for you so who give a fuck, am i right?
Another dipshit who didn't read the summary, let alone the article. It's about Great Britain...asshole
These people are obviously desperate for a job for some reason. Don't pretend like anyone can be a candidate for any job that is available. It doesn't mean they should have to starve, or conmit crimes to make christmas bearable.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
s/asshole/arsehole/g
Noting that Charles Dickens' works were often so long because he usually got paid by the word. (My wife was an English teacher.)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
If you paid them for waiting, then you'd need to cap the number of drivers active in any given area, restrict the areas drivers are allowed to wait and force drivers to take jobs on a rota, otherwise you could have drivers just "waiting" and getting paid in the middle of nowhere so they won't get any passengers.
Conversely, sparsely populated areas would never get any service because it would be unprofitable to pay someone to wait there.
When i lived in a small village there was a part time taxi driver who usually worked on vehicle maintenance/restorations... Because of the low population he might drive one or two jobs a week and make a few extra pennies, and when doing so he'd temporarily down tools on his other job and return to it when he got back. Sometimes if the passenger went to the nearest town he'd use the opportunity to go shopping.
Calling a driver from the nearest town could mean waiting more than an hour for them to arrive, and paying a fare just for them to arrive, plus wherever you wanted to go.
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Well part of what makes these first world countries is the higher standards of living and various employment laws to prevent unscrupulous employers from abusing their employees.
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Bad job?
Quit.
Can't find another job?
Protest.
Protest doesn't work?
Go to war.
This is how things have always worked before, why shouldn't this work now?
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I know. But what do you propose I do about it? We couldn't even keep Trump out of the Whitehouse. His tax plan is going to f'n kill me (kid in college and I'm in a state with SALT). I'm getting the shit kicked out of me. So are a lot of working class Americans. And all I hear from anyone else ever is: "Why don't you go back to school and update your skills?". Like that's so damn easy.
America abandoned it's working class. Do you really think they care about the rest of the world that abandoned them?
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side stepping minimum wage laws. Thing is, I'm guessing 99% of /.ers aren't in a position to worry about this. What we _are_ in a position to worry about is how 40 years of stagnant wages mean it's harder and harder for us to make ends meet. So we'll turn a blind eye. Thing is this will come around to bite us eventually, but when you're barely hanging on eventually doesn't really matter. Me? I'm just trying to get my kid through college and to hell with everything else. And that about sums it up. The working class is too busy surviving to band together and make a positive change. It's almost as if somebody designed it that way...
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The reason americans have become so complacent about getting shit cheap even if somebody else is getting fucked is because usually said people have been/still are being fucked themselves, and without a better company that is ACTUALLY AND VERIFIABLY BETTER, paying more just means being a bigger sucker and not necessarily helping improve the status quo.
America continues sliding further down the shitter because there *IS NO TRANSPARENCY* making the sort of informed decisions that would allow capitalism to work and be beneficial to all, impossible to achieve.
Capitalism only works with perfect information symmetry, the same as the necessary government transparency (including intelligence agencies!) to make democracy work. You can remain opaque for a short while when a specific operation, or external threat renders it necessary, but the longer you allow it to happen the more out of control the powers and abilities of the 'black box' will get, same as DRM, same as undisclosed government contracts, same as 'casting couch' activities.
Information asymmetry is the biggest threat to every aspect of the world (dis)order, and only by providing symmetry can the common folk make informed decisions that will allow them to wrest control back from the wealthy/politically connected few, the indignantly proud, the obscenely corrupt.
captcha was 'leftward', why yes it is... under some definitions of 'left'.
for much of my adult life, I have no sympathy. I'm working several hours more than than that seven days a week. Most of my friends in tech are too.
The peeing into a plastic bottle trick is pretty common for “professional” drivers
Also small plane pilots. The bottle is way cheaper and more comfortable than buying adult diapers.
Free advice: Do NOT use a bottle that still has an "Apple Juice" label on it.
Amazon uses boxes grossly larger than needed
I have never understood this. I get boxes from Amazon that are WAY too big for the contents all the time. This must be costing them money, for the cardboard, padding, weight, and volume. Why do they do this?
It seems to me that it would be trivial to write some code to add up the size of the contents to pick the right box. A robot could then pull the box and add it to the picking bin.
Amazon uses boxes grossly larger than needed
I have never understood this. I get boxes from Amazon that are WAY too big for the contents all the time. This must be costing them money, for the cardboard, padding, weight, and volume. Why do they do this?
It seems to me that it would be trivial to write some code to add up the size of the contents to pick the right box. A robot could then pull the box and add it to the picking bin.
There is also a cost to stocking shipping boxes that just happen to be the right size for the products you buy. Making things a uniform size has an efficiency (and hence minimizes cost) of its own. EG look at how cargo containers transformed shipping.
Do you really think that given the number of boxes that Amazon ships that they haven't looked at the price/performance of differing box sizes?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
There is also a cost to stocking shipping boxes that just happen to be the right size
Instead of stocking boxes, they could just stock flat sheets of cardboard, and laser cut the cardboard to the ideal size on-demand.
But, anyway, I don't think stocking is the main problem. I get boxes that are WAY too big, while on the same day receiving other smaller boxes that would have easily held the contents of the first box. So they clearly had the smaller boxes in stock.
I realize that the Packing Problem is NP-Hard, but there are heuristics that allow an adequate solution. They should be able to do way better.
It also matters how unemployment is counted. In the US the number is severely skewed in favor of those in office. Those who sign up for such jobs typically have not much else to chose from. More opportunity comes from more education and that is in most places getting prohibitively expensive. As far as the UK goes, once they brexited and the economy tanks worse than during Thatcher's time the number of people who can afford ordering crap on Amazon will go down drastically.
0.0% since 4 percent means 4 in 100 people can't find work already. What do you suppose will happen to the numbers if everyone who has a less than ideal job quits and refuses to take any less than ideal jobs? You don't seem to realize that most people would rather have a great job, but have to decide if they want to be able to survive and feed themselves and their family or try to live in a perfect world with the perfect job.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
The history of the trade Unions in the US starts with Train Unions. And those formed not to demand higher pay but to demand better working conditions, less overwork and gaurenteed return to home after days traveling far from home. Removal of bars in company towns was another demand (train workers were often left to rot in Railtoad owned hotels (bunkhouses) far from home until such a time as they were needed. They had to pay the hotel cost to the owners and they were in the middle of no where so the only thing to do was drink. Which created alcoholics other railroaders were afraid to work with.
THey need a union. that's what unions are for.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
See here.. The difference is what you were doing was always recognized as illegal but the law was not being enforced. What Uber's doing is generally being recognized as legal.
And you should have been outraged. You were being exploited. Just because there is a time in your life when you were no longer being exploited doesn't mean you weren't. I see this periodically, where people wonder why we need all these regulations, laws and rules when the problems they're supposed to solve are gone. What this usually means is either a) the problem doesn't affect me anymore so I don't see why it's a problem (your case) or worse b) the regulations and laws prevent the problem from happening and people can't understand that without those laws the problem would come back...
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Going through rush hour traffic every single day, dealing with road rage, near-misses, all the time with an unforgiving schedule that doesn't let you deliver just 180 parcels that day.
For less than minimum wage.
Yeah, that does fit the definition of a brutal job.
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a party who's central plank is laissez faire capitalism
Sadly, its worse than that. They want the government out of the picture as long as profits are rolling in, but as soon as shit goes south they're quite happy to beg for giant bailouts on the back of the taxpayer rather than simply letting failed companies fail as should happen in a laissez faire system.
If we look at ISPs (with all the recent flutter over net neutrality..) Their main argument against NN is that regulations are bad competition will fix it. Yet those same ISPs are continually trying to block competition, frequently by lobbying for you guessed it .. regulations .. that impede if not outright block new competitors.
You should seriously try it.
I haven't, but I've laid bricks, shoveled ditches, built circuit boards, etc... I even held a "Slow/Stop" sign for 10 hours in Florida summer heat at a construction site.
I think it taught me a few important things in life. And I never did those things for more then a few days each. I did learn to respect the people around me. I also learned that what was easy for me wasn't always easy for other people.
As for the driving and delivering packages.... you'd be absolutely shocked how much work that really is.
Read down to the approximations solution. As with many NP-hard problems, getting the optimal solution is computationally infeasible, but getting a good-enough solution is fairly easy.
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It depends on the economy. If things are great (from a wider perspective than that of just the 1%), nobody would take these jobs and conditions would improve (or the problem would be avoided).
If you have a large enough bunch of people desperate for money, though, suddenly they don't really have much choice but to be exploited.
We have laws about such things because history shows us enough rich people are OK with defacto slavery that if you let them, they'll enslave everyone they can.