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Amazon Employee Explains the Poor Working Conditions of An Amazon Warehouse
Earlier this week, James Bloodworth, a former UK Amazon employee that worked undercover in the "fulfillment center" for six-months, released a book detailing the mistreatment of warehouse employees at the commerce company. He described the work culture as a prison after discovering that Amazon warehouse staff were peeing in bottles to avoid taking too many breaks. Since the report first broke, many Amazon employees have come out to share their thoughts on the working conditions, including one Reddit user who claims that "the post is pretty spot on": They don't monitor bathroom breaks, but [your] individual rate (or production goal) [doesn't] account for bathroom breaks, or... let's say there is a problem like you need [two] of something and there's only one left, well you have to put on your "andon"... wait for someone to come "fix" for you, all the while your rate is dropping. The [two] most common reasons [people] get fired are not hitting rate, and attendance. They don't really try to help you hit rate, they just fire and replace.
My first week there [two] [people] collapsed from dehydration. It's so [commonplace] to see someone collapse that nobody is even shocked anymore. You'll just hear a manager complain that he has to do some report now, while a couple of new [people] try to help the guy (veterans won't risk helping [because] it drips rate). No sitting allowed, and there's nowhere to sit anywhere except the break rooms. Before the robots (they call them kivas) pickers would regularly walk 10-15 miles a day, now it's just stand for 10-12 hours a day. [People] complain about the heat all the time but we just get told 80 degrees (Fahrenheit obviously) is a safe working temp. [Sometimes] they will pull out a thermometer, but even when it hits 85 they just say it's fine. There's been deaths, at least one in my building... Amazon likes to keep it all hush hush. Heard about others, you can find the stories if you search for it, but Amazon does a good job burying it... Amazon has denied the allegations, saying: "Amazon ensures all of its associates have easy access to toilet facilities which are just a short walk from where they are working. Amazon provides a safe and positive workplace for thousands of people across the UK with competitive pay and benefits from day one. We have not been provided with confirmation that the people who completed the survey worked at Amazon and we don't recognize these allegations as an accurate portrayal of activities in our buildings."
My first week there [two] [people] collapsed from dehydration. It's so [commonplace] to see someone collapse that nobody is even shocked anymore. You'll just hear a manager complain that he has to do some report now, while a couple of new [people] try to help the guy (veterans won't risk helping [because] it drips rate). No sitting allowed, and there's nowhere to sit anywhere except the break rooms. Before the robots (they call them kivas) pickers would regularly walk 10-15 miles a day, now it's just stand for 10-12 hours a day. [People] complain about the heat all the time but we just get told 80 degrees (Fahrenheit obviously) is a safe working temp. [Sometimes] they will pull out a thermometer, but even when it hits 85 they just say it's fine. There's been deaths, at least one in my building... Amazon likes to keep it all hush hush. Heard about others, you can find the stories if you search for it, but Amazon does a good job burying it... Amazon has denied the allegations, saying: "Amazon ensures all of its associates have easy access to toilet facilities which are just a short walk from where they are working. Amazon provides a safe and positive workplace for thousands of people across the UK with competitive pay and benefits from day one. We have not been provided with confirmation that the people who completed the survey worked at Amazon and we don't recognize these allegations as an accurate portrayal of activities in our buildings."
Yeah, to a sweat shop in India. Oh well, without sufficient resistance, don't expect any improvement. People have to stand up and defend themselves,
are people that lazy to find another job?
Most likely there are people who see the job very differently from the author. For everyone paid less or fired for being slow, there is someone else willing to hustle, and getting paid more.
Caption Obvious makes his predictions for Amazon:
(1) Improve working conditions? No.
(2) Improve screening of new hires? Yes.
(3) PROFIT!
Bibliophile that I am, I will NOT ever buy another book from Amazon. I reached that conclusion more than 15 years ago, and I've resisted every temptation since then. Amazon is just Walmart on steroids--and I never shop at Walmart.
How long until they starve me into submission?
Anyway, remember the creed of the corporate cancers that have killed capitalism and communism and that are now working (AKA bribing and lying and scheming) to kill the last vestiges of socialism, too:
"There is no gawd but profit, and Amazon is gawd's #1 prophet!"
That's calling it on market cap in relation to the current proprietor, but on profit alone it should be Apple. Top 10 for gross profit (and I do mean gross) includes a bunch of gigantic casinos pretending to be banks.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Slashdot Poster Explains the Poor Working Conditions of An Amazon Warehouse
It's a warehouse.
P. T. Barnum said as much one night in deep philosophical debate over several rounds of beer.
The next morning, in slept in, and was in a terrible rush, and didn't have time to explain this in so many turgid words, and in his impatience, his legendary aphorism simply tumbled out of his mouth.
He was actually talking to his personnel director at the time, but the phrase later became useful at the front gate as well.
Right, because it's as easy as walking into any random office building and saying, "I want a job, give me one!" and they say, "Yes, sir/ma'am! Right this way, we'll get the paperwork started immediately!" Or if you're living paycheck to paycheck, taking even a single day off to go to an interview at another place can send your precarious finances off the cliff.
Consider yourself very fortunate if you have the luxury of being able to take your time in finding a new job. There are a lot of people out there who are not.
Waiting for the next Triangle Shirtwaist Fire incident to happen in the United States.
Profit Uber Alles
"There's been deaths, at least one in my building... Amazon likes to keep it all hush hush. Heard about others, you can find the stories if you search for it, but Amazon does a good job burying it..."
Uh, huh. Deaths. But its all "hush hush".
"He described the work culture as a prison"
If he think's it is prison then he has no concept of prison. He is free to leave any time. Poor man's deluded and should seek professional help.
You're misinterpreting what he's saying. The Amazon work culture feels like a prison because you are made to feel like an inmate with no say in your work conditions.
Sounds nearly identical to the working conditions of being a 'picker and packer' at toysmart.com. The only way to meet their quotas was to F-over everyone else / leave a mess / steal boxes from the people next to you so you wouldn't have to walk to the restocking station.
James Bloodworth, a former UK Amazon employee that worked undercover in the "fulfillment center" for six-months, released a book detailing the mistreatment of warehouse employees at the commerce company.
He was undercover for what reason? It sounds like he went looking for some anecdotes to put in the book he was writing.
I worked at Amazon for eight years, starting as a temp warehouse worker doing cycle counts in the Inventory department going through the entire IT department then ending my career there back in the Inventory department doing development for data dashboards and various ETL work.
I have no formal education other than high school, everything else has just been through hobbies and self learning. I managed about one "promotion" every 18 months or so, traveling the country, to other countries, moving to new states. I say "promotion" because you get the fancy new job, etc but the pay is worthless. Depending on where you join Amazon that is the benchmark of where you will go due to policies on pay raises etc, and yes those apply to promotions too, not just yearly reviews.
Since I started as a temp that basically sealed my fate, after 8 years and 6 or so promotions I was making 23 dollars an hour, with about 20 shares of stock included (which vest after 2 years with a 40% tax) - building custom apps for one of the largest companies in the world. When I was an IT Engineer I was given $20.50 an hour and 3 shares, to launch new buildings, train new IT teams, manage servers, manage site wide DNS, phone systems, the expansive network. Yet a new peer hired from outside the company would come in and make 27-28 an hour plus stock.
I think the problem with Amazon isn't the grueling work conditions, etc. As I've had far worse jobs (that were union even), and it's fairly easy to transfer or promote into an "easy" position but that they are constantly dangling the carrot, you always feel like one day you'll make it, and even if you do you'll have nothing to show for it.
SK
So now the conditions at Amazon are getting to be like the conditions at Foxconn.
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Slashdot Poster Explains the Poor Working Conditions of An Amazon Warehouse
It's a warehouse.
Maybe. But Amazon also employs people for software/tech jobs to keep all their automation running. I have a fulfillment center near near and I have always heard stories about how crap the pay and conditions were for even the tech jobs.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Earlier this week, James Bloodworth, a former UK Amazon employee that worked undercover in the "fulfillment center" for six-months, released a book
Not that I'm saying he's lying, or even exaggerating, but you've got to at least acknowledge the fact that he went in with an agenda, and is coming out with a book to sell.
Though he obviously didn't think it through. If he'd gone undercover somewhere else, he could've sold the book on Amazon. D'oh!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
*Reads post with furrowed brow and hand cupped over mouth, slowing shaking head all the while. Then proceeds to order 2 Echos and a Firestick*
This is the UK it’s talking about, not a third world country. Not only are a lot of companies in Europe required to give paid time off for various reasons, there is a lot more time off to begin with. Also, if you think the US has a lot of regulatory overhead, workers can join a union that isn’t tied to a job, doesn’t cost dues and actually has political power. I worked in IT and I had a union.
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so how exactly are there "veterans" of the workplace there?
are people that lazy to find another job?
If you haven't been given an education or your IQ prevents you from getting an adequate education then these people are usually stuck with this sort of work.
This is performance based workplace at it finest, where the company is managed by numbers on spreadsheets. The workers are just numbers (expenses really) and the focus is on getting the most productivity out of these expenses. Managers are rewarded on the performance they can extract leading to this sort of treatment.
When I jumped countries and came to live in the UK I was forced to take the first available job just to get going. I ended up in a large Tesco distribution centre which supplies the whole North West from Manchester to Liverpool and Wales.
Here's what I witnessed: ...but most days the strong ones were expected to work at least 10 hour shifts and it was a common practice for supervisors to ask for 12.
- 80% of the staff consisted of agency workers, most of them foreign.
- Rota was a myth; you were informed about the hours you were expected to work 2 to 4 hours before the beginning of your shift by a text or a call if you failed to respond within an hour.
- No guaranteed hours. The weakest workers could be told to go home after as little as 2 hours of work...
-
- Everyone had to wear a wrist-mounted scanner (AMT - arm-mounted terminal) which also tracked your performance. You were not given any extra time for toilet breaks.
- Agency workers (who, again, were the majority) were paid wages based on their performance. 80% - minimum wage (£7.50 p/h at that time), 100% - £8.10p/h and 110% (upper threshold) - £8.60 p/h.
- Your performance was often affected by random events. Sometimes one issue was enough to wreck your performance for the entire day. Crowded lanes, missing products, missing pallets, spillages, oversized products, jammed or damaged printers, random restarts of your AMT.
- If the above wasn't enough, supervisors were allowed to "steal" your performance by reassigning your already completed tasks to extremely low performers to bump their stats so that the agency as a whole looked better before the client (Tesco). Sadly, this is a fact and not a personal speculation (and common knowledge/practice).
- Agency workers who worked with frozen food in -21C were not given any additional protection equipment. They were expected to work in very thin gloves and suffered from frost burns daily. They usually happened to be the same people over and over again until they quit are replaced with other lucky ones.
Why do you think so much of the world hates us?
Not for the reason you've given.
Usually they hate you because your government overthrew theirs, and made their lives even more miserable, or your military dropped bombs on their house and killed their children.
Those of us who live in places not being bombed by Americans don't hate you, because we have met some of you and you're usually really nice people.
We do look at your weird, corrupt, childishly petulant government however and hope we never do anything to piss them off.
Much of the world is Islamofascist, and their religion tells them to hate us. Tyrants need an enemy, and if they don't have a real one, they make one up.
The United States is the primary mover of mass production in the world, and the world would be a much poorer place without the U.S..
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Not just him but anybody who has or is currently being abused.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
are people that lazy to find another job?
Ah, spoken like a RWNJ. It is amazing to see right-wingers constantly label people who work grueling hours -- probably much tougher work conditions than they have ever endured -- as "lazy".
Here is a hint buttercup:
The [two] most common reasons [people] get fired are not hitting rate, and attendance
It is tough to go out looking for another job when any time away from work is liable to get you fired from your present one. This is not infrequently a deliberate strategy of the employer.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
are people that lazy to find another job?
Most likely there are people who see the job very differently from the author. For everyone paid less or fired for being slow, there is someone else willing to hustle, and getting paid more.
Because in Libertarian World there are no bad working conditions, only lazy employees who are not sufficiently grateful to the 'job creators' for giving them 'opportunity'. Dead end job? No such thing!
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Wait, I thought progressives told us IQ is meaningless.
Well, taking a day off to go to job interviews might mean not eating for the next month... so how free are they to move around, really. Last time I checked, human beings needed to eat more than once a month.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
So what, try working for XPO Logistics
Seriously, when has a boycott of ANY nationwide or multinational chain really accomplished anything? In a best case scenario, you get so much media attention that the company decides it's a good P.R. move to do some token thing to show how "good" they are. When the furor subsides, they go back to business as usual.
With WalMart for example? So many people claim to hate them, but they provide employment for the relatively unemployable. If there's one thing I *really* dislike about them? It's the way they're able to work our welfare system, so they pay people JUST low enough wages so they qualify for govt. assistance while working full time for them. That's something that government itself really needs to address though. If they leave the loophole there, companies will come along and take advantage of it. IMO, those assistance programs should be there as TEMPORARY help for people who are in-between jobs. It shouldn't be supplemental income that allows someone to accept a job at a wage they'd normally consider unacceptable.
With these reports about Amazon's warehouses, I think you've got a similar situation. Most people with the ability and knowledge to do better would just quit a job in those conditions, and do something that pays at least as well to work in a better environment. If you're risking passing out and peeing in bottles to avoid bathroom breaks, you're basically trying to stay employed as a simulated robot. Amazon and others trying to run things this way are sending a clear message; we would really rather just use robots. And IMO, that's inevitably where this will all lead.
The unions want you to think they can fix this, by FORCING employers to give you better pay and better conditions doing these same tasks. But that only works when the employer still needs HUMAN labor. It used to be, that was a given. But today, it's not.
There are at least 7 things wrong with that.
I'm not a faggot.
I didn't cry as Trump was imprisoned.
- Trump isn't imprisoned.
- I wouldn't cry about it if it were to happen.
News of Trump being imprisoned wouldn't wait until 11.
- My crying about it (which wouldn't happen) wouldn't be newsworthy.
- - If it somehow did make the nightly news, my local market (most likely to air my crying / not crying) runs nightly news at 10 PM.
or large swaths of the Southern United States? You just plain get trapped. It's got nothing to do with your abilities. There just isn't much work unless you're rockin' a college degree and then you probably get out of Dodge because the schools suck and the water's full of lead.
.com boom. Stop blaming the victim. GP is 100% right. Any attempt to Unionize it met with the full force of their corporate legal team plus every lobbyist they can muster.
Walmart hasn't been scrapping the bottom since the
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when the Teamsters ran them.
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Karl Marx talked about how capital would flow to where ever labor was cheapest in a never ending race to the bottom but all anybody can remember about him is that a couple of fascists borrowed his books for rhetoric.
Here's a crazy idea: Instead of the folks in the UK getting worse lives how about the rest of Europe get _better_ lives?
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Have gnu, will travel.
Most likely there are people who see the job very differently from the author. For everyone paid less or fired for being slow, there is someone else willing to hustle, and getting paid more.
Exactly. Just like for every child laborer in the 1800s that complained about needing to go to "school", there was another hard worker willing to risk his tiny, efficient fingers in the machines!
Then the frackin labor laws ruined everything! Now where's my monacle?
30 - 40 years of declining wages mean we're all doing whatever we can to hang on. The most obvious thing is buying cheap stuff from China through online retailers.
It saves me a couple grand a year, which has just barely kept my income ahead of inflation these last few years. I'm just trying to make it until the kid's out of college. I know full well the human cost of it all, but I'm a pretty weak guy. I can barely hang on myself. I know logically that if we'd all stand together we'd be saved but I also know that's just not what happens. I'm an American, and I can't even more than 60% of us to agree that we should all get healthcare. And most of that 60% is in two out of 50 States.
I think the race to the bottom is just going to accelerate. We could stop it whenever we want, but it would mean accepting the occasional guy like this. From what I'd see folks would rather starve to death in the streets than see a guy like that get food stamps and health care.
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Do you believe everything you are told?
IQ obviously isn't meaningless, it measures how well you perform on an IQ test. It perhaps is not a great measure of intelligence, though I don't think we have anything better, but is certainly a correlate of intelligence.
Preach!
If you're working at a job like that, do you think you'll be *able* to look for another job after work?
I worked at a place much less worse (I don't want to say better) than that during a summer vacation during college, and after a shift I wasn't up for much of anything. I sure couldn't have looked for another job. If you haven't done a job like that, you have no idea how draining it can be.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Warehouses used to be a not bad job for someone without much education or skills, at least according to the people I've known that worked in them. Nothing fantastic but not shitty like this is described.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
That's a interesting thought. There was a time when US legislator (I forget whether Senator or Representative) went to prison and continued to hold his office. Would the same be true of a President? It's not the same as impeaching him. Would the Vice-President be allowed to sign and veto bills if the President were in prison? Or would someone need to cart the bill over to the prison for me to sign?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
would someone need to cart the bill over to the prison for him to sign?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Don't like it, form a union, go on strike and shut down the fulfilment centre until conditions change. Don't forget, collect evidence and get your union to sue the crap out of Amazon, fight, fight, fight, fuck em! Don't beg for nothing, you are a citizen, fight for your rights, to a decent job and a decent wage or choose to be fucked up the arse by your employer and allow your cowardice to pass the privilege onto future generations. It boils down to this, you simply have no other choice than to fight, else conditions and wages will just get worse and worse and worse.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
By attendance... Do they mean absences without using leave? If that's the case, they should be fired.
Amazon's vacation offerings are garbage until you've been there at least a year, then they merely suck. If someone is working in a physically demanding environment for long hours with lost sleep (and meals - I used to work at Amazon and was constantly pressured to work through my lunch) isn't the healthiest lifestyle. Sometimes the body just breaks the fuck down. I don't know if it's consistent everywhere, but the facility that I worked at offered vending machines and as long as you worked the day shift you could maybe find one of three area restaurants to get food from. Otherwise it's gas station food - and that's IF you're not working alone (you can't leave the facility unmanned, so if you work alone it doesn't matter what's open, you're not going anywhere). Employee considerations are garbage. Turnover is high, and amazingly enough most people get fired/let go/asked to leave about three months before they become vested in their stocks. During my year and half at Amazon I went from "98% of Amazon Employees have been here longer than you" to "62% of the employees have been here longer than you" (there's an internal tool that calculates that for you, which should also tell you something). 18 months and 30% of Amazon staff had been replaced - that's a pretty fucking big number.
Having worked there (although not at an FC), I can say that the allegations really don't surprise me despite them being a departure from what I experienced. I was 'lucky' enough to have a desk job there, so the physical demands were not particularly bad. The problem is that "shit rolls downhill" and the managers there would prefer to manipulate their staff and be lazy than do their own job - every aspect of the managers' position is handled by the employees themselves. Self-reviews, self-promotions, self-pay-resolution, and figure-it-out-yourself training. You "manage" your own vacation time through a tool; managers are essentially there for two reasons: 1) Protection for the managers above them (giving them someone to fire when *they* can't keep up) and 2) to hire/fire through a revolving door. They don't get paid well enough to do the job to begin with and with many people it teaches them to be lying douchbags because they need to keep their job and feed their family as well. The only real function that I ever saw them provide to anyone during my time there (and this was fairly consistent, although there were a couple of managers that tried to do the job properly) was "finding the person to engage when the employee had a problem that they couldn't fix by themselves". Absofuckinglutely useless.
I would like to say that there's no "easy" solution, but honestly if they stripped out about 6 layers of management they could "afford" (lol) to hire enough people to do the real work that the people currently there struggling could have enough time to do the job properly instead of rushing through quite literally everything. During the last year and a half there I helped to train no fewer than a dozen different TPMs, and knew of only two that had been there longer than me.
You can call me a bleeding heart liberal all you want, but I do not "live to work", I "work to live". I worked way too hard for the last 20 years to be treated like a fucking volunteer, especially by a company that somehow can't offer competitive rates or enough staff to perform the work yet rakes in quite literally billions in revenue.
The South has lower unemployment than the national average.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, US national average unemployment rate is 4.1%.
From that same source, average unemployment rate for Southern states only, comes out to 4.18%.
For the average to be below the national, more than half of the Southern states would have to be discounted, concentrating only on Tennessee (3.4), Virginia (3.5), Alabama (3.7), Arkansas (3.8), Florida (3.9) and Texas (4.0).
Of the rest, only Oklahoma and Kentucky are at national average, while the remaining 50% of Southern states average out to 4.55%, with their range spanning from Maryland (4.2) all the way to West Virginia (5.4).
And that's seasonally adjusted. With raw data, average unemployment in the South is higher, at 4.35%.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
... if you set standards that require the workers to use it unsafely.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
This is the UK it’s talking about, not a third world country. Not only are a lot of companies in Europe required to give paid time off for various reasons, there is a lot more time off to begin with. Also, if you think the US has a lot of regulatory overhead, workers can join a union that isn’t tied to a job, doesn’t cost dues and actually has political power. I worked in IT and I had a union.
But Thatcher and successive governments since have gutted union legislation to leave unions essentially toothless. Governments can seize or freeze unions' bank accounts and have all kinds of ways of outlawing strikes.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
How many people from the original Amazon Elexa team still work there? NONE. Seriously every single scientist, engineer, and expert quit as soon as the contract was up with the Amazon echo. The current team probably was flown in from India on the cheap.
They treat everyone but board members like shit. I was going to apply as a senior desktop and jr system engineer and the recruiter told me $35K a year as a contractor ... I hung up the phone. Sorry, employers have shown me not trust them if they promise you the world and will give you promotions or job security.
They simple do not care and will simply fire and replace until they find someone willing to work below value.
http://saveie6.com/
Do you believe everything you are told?
IQ obviously isn't meaningless, it measures how well you perform on an IQ test. It perhaps is not a great measure of intelligence, though I don't think we have anything better, but is certainly a correlate of intelligence.
You'l be pleased to find out that there is something better than IQ tests - Working memory capacity tests: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... They're accurate and reliable, i.e. predictive of performance on a range of tasks, and have greater validity than IQ tests.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
Warehouses used to be a not bad job for someone without much education or skills, at least according to the people I've known that worked in them. Nothing fantastic but not shitty like this is described.
The problem is freaking metrics. I hate them!
Call centers are horrible too ans run by them. Literally if you give yourself a break more than 3 seconds the team leader RUNS right behind you and freaks out and points to a watch. It was crazy.
THey hurt Dell, GE, and others. I have been let go from a job over them and it was rediculious as it was not a call center or warehouse. It was an MBA from a customer who only saw the numbers in one area that is measurable. GE and Dell came up with firing 15% every year. As a result no one can retire as you are eventually fired. As a result Dell lost alot of good people and many refuse to work under these conditions.
You always need to be careful with them. They ruined product quality and employee morale.
http://saveie6.com/
There are informative links to relevant stories about Foxconn and Pegatron (the sweatshops Apple switched to after Foxconn) on Richard Stallman's website. Some on Amazon's worker exploitation as well.
Digital Citizen
Well it depends, if amazon is no longer able to operate warehouses this way they're not going to just shut up shop and go home... They still need to operate their warehouses, so they will start offering better conditions.
The downside is that complying with all these regulations increases costs, which are then passed onto the customers, labour in third world countries is cheaper largely because they don't have the same regulatory hoops to jump through.
The increased costs also push companies to explore cheaper alternatives, in a lot of third world countries everything is done manually while in richer countries machines will be used, parking meters for example aren't common in third world countries where someone will be sitting in a booth collecting your parking fees.
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The examples given are in the UK, the UK government provides all kinds of welfare systems including education programs. There are many people in the UK who never work and claim welfare their entire lives.
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Technically, all businesses are managed by spreadsheets.
In my experience, problems occur when an arse-licking manager thinks that replacing anyone who doesn't fit 'the numbers', will improve the numbers. That may work in labour-intensive jobs but in the back-office, faulty machines don't get replaced and productivity continues to plummet.
Union demarcation of the 1970s meant a lot of lost productivity waiting for someone to do their job but it helped misfits find a niche skill/task in the organisation. Now that everyone needs to be a extroverted, multi-skilled team-player, the number of misfits is a lot higher but businesses just fire and replace.
Why aren't employees calling government Health and Safety?
There's been deaths ...
How did the government fail to investigate this?
Why wasn't some manager arrested for not ensuring first aid is given?
I know several people that work or have worked at Amazon in tech and it's almost as bad with management and incompetence. A Friend of mine who's working as a contractor describes what he's running into with the Echo team and the incompetence he's running into there. I also have a close relative who spent quite a long time there. Managers are basically at each other's throats and the politics are insane from what everyone tells me. My friend who's a contractor there working on the Echo keeps telling me horror stories about the incompetence he runs into daily from lead developers. Another friend of mine who left told me that most of the competent people leave.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
There are only lazy employees. Perhaps they should take their laziness to the max and reduce their pulse rate to zero. Useless fucks.
It would seem that a few of them have.
"Why was this man dismissed?"
"He was dead."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_62Nk8KiQaU
... when it hits 85 they just say it's fine.
Why aren't employees calling government Health and Safety?
There's been deaths ...
How did the government fail to investigate this? ... veterans won't risk helping ...
Why wasn't some manager arrested for not ensuring first aid is given?
Because MOST of the post is quoting some rando-anon reddit user, and not the investigative journalist.
many Amazon employees have come out to share their thoughts on the working conditions, including one Reddit user who claims that "the post is pretty spot on":
They don't monitor bathroom breaks, but [your] individual rate (or production goal) [doesn't] account for bathroom breaks, or... let's say there is a problem like you need [two] of something and there's only one left, well you have to put on your "andon"... wait for someone to come "fix" for you, all the while your rate is dropping. The [two] most common reasons [people] get fired are not hitting rate, and attendance. They don't really try to help you hit rate, they just fire and replace.
TL,DR; random reddit user fits my agenda. Let's quote him instead.
you took the words right out of my mouth
"Amazon ensures all of its associates have easy access to toilet facilities which are just a short walk from where they are working. Amazon provides a safe and positive workplace for thousands of people across the UK with competitive pay and benefits from day one."
All of *Amazon's* associates, not necessarily the contractor's associates (like Integrity Staffing in the US)
"We have not been provided with confirmation that the people who completed the survey worked at Amazon and we don't recognize these allegations as an accurate portrayal of activities in our buildings."
They worked for a contractor, which allows Amazon to wash the blood off their hands, rinse, and repeat with another agency.
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
right, because someone who works in a warehouse can afford 'professional' help
UK employment law is very different. You do not get fired for being slow, although a short-term contract may not be renewed. It is also not piece work, so working harder will not immediately increase pay.
What an absurd set of cartoon characterisations.
you dont get to be one of the richest man on earth without some dead bodies
> Because in Libertarian World
Yes, but in a Libertarian World, nobody would be forced to take a *specific* job in order to keep their home, as it done in the UK. People are forced into job with benefit sanctions, and that (intentionally) enables the exploitation of workers.
That being said, the case is clearly more complicated, because there are both happy and unhappy workers at Amazon. They also pay significantly above national average, which would indicate that it is not a "minimum wage dead end job". Maybe they pay more because the conditions are so terrible, and that is cheaper than fixing the conditions? It is worth asking those questions, and whether laws (such as the duty of care towards employees) were broken.
This isn't the USA. You don't just go suing for shits and giggles, that'll just likely end you broke. You also forget that industrial action goes both ways. You want to shutdown the fulfillment centre, can you make your next rent payment if you do?
Sometimes it cuts both ways good and proper. I remember working at a place where a whole lot of people went on strike. The following week there was a performance review and a whole lot of new faces everywhere, and this was in Australia where workers rights are pretty damn well protected.
I seem to recall a few years ago someone who had quit retail for amazon warehouse work... quit the warehouse and went back to hating retail due to it being too physically demanding. This was before the picking robots and whatnot, so they basically were almost running around to pick orders fast enough. She had to quit due to health issues that started popping up and the recommendation of her doctor. I don't think it was her, but someone else that told me the next part. Something about some of the hotter locations in summer would just have emergency vehicles outside because now and then people would pass out from heat exhaustion during the hotter summer days.
Do you know what you're talking about? More than 20 years ago I worked in a shipping warehouse in college for a company that only hired college students for those jobs. It paid pretty well compared to other crummy jobs available in a student saturated college town, but the conditions were not great and because it was a shipping company it was all about the numbers. The company kept an account at the doc-in-the-box down the street for the injuries which happened ALL THE TIME. Ever loaded a trailer that's been sitting out in the sun in the South for hours when it's 100 degrees outside and 95% humidity?
There really is something called "hard work." It's hard. Some people--like college students--only have to do those jobs for a little while. Some people are stuck in those jobs. I can't imagine waking up everyday and knowing that my college job was the best it was going to be for the rest of my life. These jobs have been pretty tough for a long time.
Make love, not reality television.
Having seen their hiring process and the kind of questions they ask during interviews, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to work there for any amount of money.
I have a feeling it's actually a kind of age discrimination. Ask university exam style questions that no-one with a few years of experience remembers any more. Make the fresh graduates think they are good because they answered it, and then run them into the ground until they quit.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Years ago I remember reading someone saying Red Venture was a great company to work for. I was still in retail and thought I'd try them out. Then I started reading employee reviews and saw people saying stuff like: "You have to raise your hand to use the bathroom, usually you have to wait 15 minutes and they might tell you that you can't go and to wait til break time." Decided not to bother.
After Brexit the UK may be applying for admission to the Third World community.
Look, there's no way things in the UK are going to improve that much after Brexit.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
so how exactly are there "veterans" of the workplace there?
are people that lazy to find another job?
If you haven't been given an education or your IQ prevents you from getting an adequate education then these people are usually stuck with this sort of work.
This
Those who believe this "oh, just go find another job" malarky have never worked a real job in their lives. They were probably given a cushy job in a large firm straight out of university (which they barely studied at) by one of daddy's contacts.
As someone who didn't have a rich daddy and worked shit jobs when they were young, there are no better jobs if you don't have a good education. You can quit your warehouse job for another job in another warehouse that is just as shit as the one you came from.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I'm an American, and I look at my weird, corrupt, childishly petulant government and hope *I* never do anything to piss them off.
It is worth asking those questions
Absolutely. Say a warehouse worker gets paid above national average salary, but working conditions are outright hellish. Is this acceptable? What about paying a starvation wage but providing great on-the-job benefits and working conditions?
Morally, I would say both are not acceptable. There is no moral reason Amazon couldn't pay less and then introduce mandatory 5 minute bathroom/rest breaks every 2 hours. I suspect the reason Amazon doesn't do this is because it reduces their profits by marginally reducing per hour productivity. So in my mind Amazon is at least amoral.
"Never spend more for an acquisition than you have to."
-Jeff Bezos
Lick those boots!
The "professional" help is free under his state mandated health care.
"How "FREE" are you to leave when you have little-to-none job skills"
That issue is his fault, not Amazon's.
"Professional Help" is provided free as part of his state backed health care. Observe where he is located before you make false statements.
Well, considering that until President Trump was elected, the unemployment rate was rather high,. I'd suggest laziness was the least of their worries in finding another job.
But my question is, do we not have some rather stringent regulations for Occupational Health and Safety? How does Amazon get a pass on OSHA?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
My son briefly worked as a "manager" in a warehouse in Seattle/Tacoma several years ago. His stories to us about a "driven" work environment correspond with what's in the article. Needless to say, he's not there any more. It wasn't a voluntary departure.
We do look at your weird, corrupt, childishly petulant government
So, in other words, exact like your government (i.e. all fucking governments) but with its mask removed.
I call BS.
Defining an employee as exempt has a test, and in no way will all employees meet it.
Additionally, labor law requires that if an exempt and salaried employee works ANY hours in the period, they get paid salary (with some exceptions involving benefit-defined days off).
What you're talking about would have a state employment office all over them like a cured diabetic on chocolate cake.
*Suppose* that this were one particular franchise, and you'd be doing the world a favor by reporting them. Yesterday.
you're adding in health care, the cost of which has long since spiraled out of control and is several times inflation. That's not more wages because it's not more wealth. My company might be paying $2000 a month for my health care on top of the $500 I pay but that doesn't mean I get $2500 worth of value. That money just gets filtered back up to the 1% in the form of stock dividends. It's another trick to keep wages low. Nothing more, nothing less.
Cheap electronics I rarely buy don't solve the wage decline problem. You need to consider what I call "Real" inflation, which is the rising cost of necessities (food, shelter, healthcare, education, transportation & retirement savings). As those things become an increasingly large percentage of your expenses your actual buying power goes down. This is why a woman who got laid off from K-Mart recently after 44 years started at $3/hr ($16/hr inflation adjusted dollars) and ended at $10.50. She lost a third of her pay over her career.
You don't get better results by cherry picking your stats, you get the Establishment's results. The funny thing is your sig rails against that same establishment but you're falling in line with their narrative. Wake up and go watch some clips from Bernie Sanders. You've been had.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Why are you a liar?
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
If you WANT to have or change jobs, finding a job should be considered a full time job. So if you need to "work two jobs", yes, get some PTO and go to an interview. This isn't skilled labor either, it's not like the job interview is going to take more than a walk in and a conversation.
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Obligatory attack on libertarians before they even show up. This is turning into a slashdot inside joke. Rip on libertarians that don't even exist. WTF?
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
The national average is like $24 an hour.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
" You do not get fired for being slow"
Most of the time you don't get fired in the US either. the good employees pick up your slack and they get paid more..if they are smart enough to wrangle the money out of the bosses hands.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Then again...for most of the people walking into an Amazon fulfillment center it is the first time they have ever had to really work in their life. There is a very small amount profit in each fulfillment and the worker adds little value. Perhaps Amazon should call out fulfillment costs instead of burying them out of site and mind? Perhaps amazon should stream video of the fulfillment process across the world? I would like to see Wal-Mart post video of the factory right next to their clothing as well.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
I guess none of these people ever worked outside in the summer or were in the Navy. Temperatures in the engine room of the WWII era destroyer I was on easily reached 110 degrees F. It was 10 degrees hotter in the boiler rooms. I do not remember anyone collapsing, much less dying.
As a farm owner in the South I have worked under a pole barn with the thermometer at 104 F all day. You just drink plenty of water and keep going.
So you mean you should go see the pharma dealer. And get so zonked out that he's no longer aware of or bothered by his horrible exploitation.
You have part of the effects (i.e. who pays for it), but you're missing that if you force a company to make a job "better", via pay or working conditions, or health benefits, or whatever means, then it's not the same people who end up in that job over time. Once the job gets better, then people who are "worth more" in the job are more willing to take that job instead of a different one, displacing the people who would previously have been the best candidate for the job.
As an extreme example for illustration purposes (not knowing your actual job), if your employer decided to be crazy and pay 100 million a year for your job, you would be very unlikely to be the one getting that salary. You'd get the absolute best qualified people in the world wanting the job and the employer would pick one of them to do it, not you. So the "job" gets better, but the person currently doing it as the best job they can find doesn't end up in it, they go somewhere else which now matches their qualifications better.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
In California all workers are required to take the following breaks - less than 2 hours us no break. 2:01 to 5:59 is 1 10 minute break. Over 6 hours is 1 10 minute and 1 unpaid 30 minute break to be taken before the 5th hour of a shift. 8 hours is 2x 10 minute and 1x 30 minute unpaid. 10 hours is 3x 10 minute and 1x 30 minute unpaid. 12 hours is 3x 10 minute and 2x 30 minute unpaid brakes before the 5th and 10th hour of a shift. Works fine down here and I think it's fairly reasonable allotment of breaks.
Not in my lifetime, and I'm getting up there. At some point, you really have to stop slinging old insults.
Also, the people who weren't progressives didn't have a great civil rights record either.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Unfortunately one of those tests is met if you directly manage 3 or 4 people (I forget) as 51% of your job duties. So basically you just have 4 non exempt regular employees and say everyone else is a manager to get around that.
C'mon. Don't leave us in suspense. Explain who determines "OK" and why nobody pays attention.
Calling Palin incompetent is reasonable, while calling Clinton incompetent isn't.
You do realize that women are actually human, and have normal human variations in things, I hope.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
So you said it yourself be a coward or be brave, your choice, less so for the next generation because you are making the choice much harder for them. They used to publicly shoot to kill unionist in the street, they paid a high price with their courage, so that this generation could now sell out with cowardice. A temporarily empty pocket now is better than the next generation having to fight back when they are being shot in the streets because we let it get so bad. Look at the silence in main stream media with Israel purposefully shooting unarmed protesters (the Ghandi types, the leaders, they shoot in the head), how silent will main stream media be, should they start shooting unionists, elsewhere in the world, shh, don't say anything you might lose your job, so what is other people are losing their life.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
So pay, easily, 10K to move (long distance moving is expensive) and hope you get a job in a place with a more depressed economy.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Grocery stores don't give away food for free. Most people live paycheck to paycheck. No job means no money means no food.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
You clearly don't understand difficult working conditions. I've worked at several different jobs, and yes, after work I was always tired. That's not the same. I once worked 4 24 hour days as a programmer. (Well, I was in my late 20's, and didn't realize how poorly I was probably performing at the end of it. Walking home the last day I literally fell asleep while crossing the street. Fortunately it was a small quiet street, and nobody drove by.) But that wasn't as draining as the job in that factory warehouse. And the job in the factory warehouse was constant stress rather than constant work. The work wasn't the problem, exactly. If I could have done the same amount of work in four hours (well, maybe five) it would have been a lot easier, but you can't work either faster or slower than the stage ahead of you. (I didn't have a stage behind, as I was loading pallets, but that might have made things worse.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
So the vile assault on Palin wasn't misogyny? And calling Hillary a criminal was misogyny? You're just making my point for me, that when We The Good People engage in disgusting misogyny, it's OK because we're doing it to The Other. When The Other does it to us, it's wrong because they're not Us.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Calling someone incompetent when they are is neither vile nor misogyny. It could be a misjudgment, but nothing about Palin ever screamed "competence" to me. Calling Clinton a criminal is not necessarily misogyny, but seems to fall short on the question of evidence. The only real rap against her is the classified material in the email, and I've never seen a plausible argument that she did it deliberately. I haven't found a case of anyone who faced criminal prosecution for non-deliberate mishandling of classified material.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I've seen it a number of times, shitty employees put up with this because they don't want any light shed on them. Or they just don't know what the fuck proper hygiene is. In manufacturing, I'd see 2-3 competent people run the floor, and a dozen people who would stand around and need to be told every fucking thing. The competent people get promoted, leaving just shitty people. Then some new person gets hired and again, bests the shitty dozen. If it takes you 50% longer to do your job than the person next to you, you should be fired. Whenever I hear of people working 50+ hours a week (and not getting paid overtime) more than once or twice are just hiding the fact they're not capable of doing the job. The other year when I was at a contract manufacturer, I was there to setup test laptops for programming the devices. The employees would operate slowly, forcing overtime (part covered by us, part eaten by the company) because they fucked up so often and needed rebuild and repairs, not counting damaged components. It drove us nuts how much they chatted mindlessly instead of concentrating on doing their fucking jobs. Companies need a way to weed out shitty workers. If companies don't meet the labour laws, complain to the government. If there's no labour laws to protect you, fucking make them.
I've never heard this before about special privilege. Never. Who exactly is going to complain? The slower students who can now not feel as dumb and get further help when needed or the gifted student who wasn't being challenged? It's usually for social reasons when skipping grades. My middle and high school and many others split classes into difficulty levels when there's enough students. Two people can be in grade 10 and one does regular math and another do advanced grade 11. You can graduate early since you can satisfy graduatation requirements earlier.
The only reason the Clintons were not frog marched in cuffs for numerous felonies over the years was the swamp and the fact that the elites in both parties have been covering for each other for decades. Ask any active duty military. If they had done what Hillary did with her email sever and classified emails, they would be in jail. Nearly all politicians are crooked, but to try to claim that the Clintons are not outright mobsters is laughable to anyone who has been paying attention. Hell, Bill Clinton straight up raped several women and got away with it.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I write warehouse control systems, have spent a lot of time in, and talked to plenty of people working in many of the large warehouses featured in some of these articles (although not this particular one, as I think Amazon make their own software).
I don't honestly believe they are as bad as is made out. It's never going to be thrilling work, it will always be monotonous for the pickers and packers, and I suspect many working there would wish they could get a different type of job. But people I've met generally seem OK with life there. Particularly out in the warehouse diagnosing issues, I can often see/hear people chatting away at adjacent workstations while they do the job, or short chats with people on pick walks as they pass each other. It's not exactly a hellish environment anywhere I've seen.
One warehouse I commissioned back around 2004, one of the warehouse workers got to grips with our software really well. I've come across him a few more times since then gradually moving into the IT world, last time he was on the CAB committee for changes across all their sites. Someone has posted their own first hand equivalent story elsewhere I've seen. I've seen plenty of similar situations.
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Bootlickers tend to support the government subsidizing those that are less capable. Your rejection of my argument would, therefore, make you the bootlicker, and your comment thus is projection.
Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm - how's that bootleather taste, broham?
Ah, whataboutism.
Remember the vile misogynistic assault on Sarah Palin?
You won't get any support for that sort of misogynism from this liberal. It is not OK.
It's not exactly an absurd set of characterizations to say that the American Left despises the working class. They voted for Trump!
You can dislike someone's choice without despising someone. You are making a leap of logic to vilify a group.
It's because the Left regards the Right as "The Other" and doesn't feel that the rules of civilized discourse apply.
That is true of a small minority, hence pointing out your absurd characterisations. I am liberal but have conservative friends and will debate with them. As long as they are honest and their hearts are in the right place and aren't suggesting something awful, that is fine as I don't believe I have some monopoly over 'the truth'.
You seem to have three problems there.
First, there's what I mentioned about the emails: nobody who inadvertently mishandled classified materials was criminally prosecuted. Go ahead and find someone, or (ideally) shut up. That may not be what they tell people in the military, but it's how things work in practice, including for people with no significant political clout.
Second, there's a distinct lack of evidence for your claims, not to mention a distinct lack of specificity. The rape claims are unproven (I've seen evidence that Clinton might have raped one woman), and rape is difficult to prove. Lots of people get off rape charges. It's not a good thing, but that's how things go. I have no idea how many politicians have committed rape, or at least sexual harassment.
Third, the Clintons have been extensively investigated for a number of things by hostile investigators, and have come out fairly clean.
It's very clear that the Clintons are not particularly good people, and the Paula Jones case established that Bill is a real jerk at minimum, but when I try to track down specific accusations, they always turn out to be trumped-up (pun unintentional, but I'll take it) or outright stupid. Hillary Clinton, as far as I can tell, was accused of nothing specific substantially wrong over Benghazi, but the accusers were loud.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I can tell you don't get out much. Americans are no longer conspicuous consumers compared to the rest of the world.
People do think we have it good here but your average joe sixpack wouldn't know the difference if you transplanted him across a dozen random countries excluding the poorest ones.
In america it's extremely important that we keep our underclass convinced that no matter what their situation they should be happy to have a roof and a frozen pizza because believe you me it's worse everywhere else.
People from other countries have often told me that america is a disappointment.
"it's just as bad or worse everywhere else.. trust me this is normal"
Yeah unless you travel time back to 1978 nowdays watergate is quaint.