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: MAGA

[fluffernutter]

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.

Re:Why is this so cheap?

[MikeDataLink]

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

Re:MAGA

[Anonymous Coward]

s/asshole/arsehole/g

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:Things to come

[Bert64]

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.

Re:11-hour days?

[Bert64]

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.

Re:Why is this so cheap?

[ScentCone]

Of course this has nothing to do with any actual merchandise (in the US, OR in the UK, which is what the article is about). Which you know, but are pretending you don't.

This is about last-mile delivery service, apparently a good deal of which is being done by contractors who sign up to complete the work at a fixed price without having the foresight to contemplate the nature of the seasonal traffic for a few weeks in December.

I don't have to ask

[rsilvergun]

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?

Re:I don't have to ask

[DNS-and-BIND]

Liberal whites wanted to be rid of the culturally conservative, economically liberal, working-class white voters whom Democrats had courted in the previous decade. Upper-middle-class whites were embarrassed by these people. After all these centuries of white privilege, they never managed to get into a good schoolâ"or even a state collegeâ"and now they were making demands about trade and immigration.

One of the themes that emerges from Shattered (a chronicle of the Clinton campaign) is that the Clinton operation didnâ(TM)t want to make a strong play for working-class white voters in swing states. The Clintonites thought these voters were disposable. That's you.

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: Why is this so cheap?

[nehumanuscrede]

I'm the wierd American who prefers quality over cost. I refuse to deal with Black Friday bullshit and just stay away from it.

I'll happily pay MORE for an item if the quality warrants it.

The gig economy has been about this since day 1

[rsilvergun]

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...

Not to mention...

[Anonymous Coward]

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'.

Re: Why is this so cheap?

[hjf]

Yes. https://www.fool.com/investing...

Re:Asd someone that's worked Seattle Hundreds...

[hey!]

Which illustrates why "solidarity" was a principle of the labor movement, back when there was one in this country. It was also the name of the labor union in Poland that broke the power of the Communist Party.

That is how do you deal with the fact you're too politically insignificant and an indivdidual to do anything about being screwed. Get together with enough other insignificant people that you're not insignificant. It's mind boggling to me that people react with stories of people being treated like shit by claiming they get treated even shittier, as if that were something to be proud of.

Re:11-hour days?

[OzPeter]

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?

Re:Why is this so cheap?

[Kjella]

Something you will never hear any consumer ask themselves. Well, apart from wondering if it's a "Rollex" they're buying. The whole idea of capitalism is that money should go to the business that's most efficient, how can you tell if they're just brilliant at process automation and reducing overhead or exploiting the employees? And it's usually not their employees, it's a conglomerate of vendors, sub-contractors, partners, shipping/distribution/sales channels and so on that's five steps removed from the label on the box.

I'll admit that here I expect other regulatory bodies to step in and make sure what's happening is done legally, like those who oversee commercial transportation and work/rest hours, regulations on wages and overtime pay and so on. The general public is not supposed to have that level of internal detail to inspect it themselves, since it'd be a treasure trove of competition-sensitive information. All you'd get are haphazard reactions to real or manufactured scandals leaking to the press.

True, in a few limited areas like child labor, animal testing of products, trees from the rain forest and the use of certain chemicals pressure from the top has actually made an impact. But on basic working conditions like wages and such I don't think that'll ever be effective. It's either the government stepping in through law or the workers uniting through unions. To expect consumers to solve that problem for them I think is foolish. I'm not always going to go with the lowest bidder, but I'm going with the best offer for me.

Re: MAGA

[MoarSauce123]

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.

THis is why Unions were invented.

[goombah99]

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.

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.

Re: MAGA

[Calydor]

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.

Re:Clinton didn't want to be rid of them

[Altrag]

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.