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

[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: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: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.

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.