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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."
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.
Why don't you understand that as soon as they "stand up and defend themselves" they're all fired?
Walmart was/still is like that. Unionize? They'll close the whole store and rebuild it across town!
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.
Fired? You mean like just like when you sat on a customer's seat at that car wash that I worked one summer, vacuuming 1 car/minute for 8 hours when it was 46C out, and we only got one 30 minute water break?
"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.
Walmart was/still is like that. Unionize? They'll close the whole store and rebuild it across town!
That is not why union votes fail at Walmart. If a Walmart store unionized, the workers would be better paid and have better working conditions, but they would also be DIFFERENT PEOPLE. For $15 per hour, Walmart could hire a different class of workers from what they get now for $10 per hour. My local Walmart has elderly employees, an employee in a wheelchair, and two workers that appear to be siblings with Down's Syndrome. Walmart has created productive employment for these people by scraping the bottom of the workforce barrel. Higher wages will push these people out. By voting against the union, they are not as dumb as you think they are.
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
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.
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,
Do that and a robot takes over.
I got fired last year which is embarrassing for an employee who is not entry level. Why? My metrics on cases per day for a successful software company were not high enough. I busted my butt off and did fine in the final month. But during the first 2 to 3 months I was slower as I got used to the products I was working with. I got 1 1 star rating out of 320 customers. It was not even my fault. It was her system. Yet that was enough to tank me and 5 other people on our team when a new manager came in and wanted to show how cool he was by firing the lower metric folks.
It happens and welcome to the 21st century. I deserved to be fired and employed for 5 months later. I was .6 cases per day to low and even if we were not call center employees the customer like high productivity.
You can't defend yourself if the customer wants this. The customer will go to a competitor instead and the bosses job is to keep his at all costs so the burden is on you. That is just the way it is. If no one can do that then a computer program or robot should be doing it to make the customer happy.
http://saveie6.com/
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.
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
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.
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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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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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.
Unions can be more then about the pay. There is also working conditions, things like a break every 2 hours and not spending 12 hours standing on your feet, something that'll fuck you in the long run. The local grocery store here only lets their cashiers stand at the till for 4 hours before having them do something else that involves movement, but then they're interested in stopping unionization by treating the workers well, and it's working.
Businesses can be insanely cheap. One of the longest strikes, for health reasons, in Canada involved an Asbestos plant. Workers went on strike with some simple demands, 2 lockers, one for their street clothes, one for their work clothes, showers to wash the asbestos off after work, car wash for the same reason, and a clean lunch room. Sounds pretty reasonable but the company didn't think so.
http://www.cbc.ca/archives/ent...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
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
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.
... 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/
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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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.
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> 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.
So, surrender is the only option then? Nice future to leave for the kids...
Drones should be the next battle bots for entertainment
FYI the last job has recruiters emailing me and the pay is now in the 40K range?! LOL. They are desperate and can't find qualified applicants who are willing to meet the insane metrics and work cheap so they are lowering the pay so the famous software company (under NDA here) won't penalize the company.
Look who has the gold makes the rules. If the big companies want to save money they will. You can't fight em. The customer will always win a battle with your boss. However, the flipside is there is cost to being cheap. You get inferior performance and employees.
They try to treat this by hiring inferior employees and then laying down metrics and micro manage them to get better results. In the end you get accuracy and a bad reputation.
AMazon is one place I refuse to work at. My brother could get hired there tomorrow but he won't either. None of the Amazon Echo/Alexia team are still there. They all jumped ship after the product was built. Now they have no one who knows the product and will have to pay more to relearn what the experts left.
The only way you can win as the small guy is to be a bigger guy. Gain some skills and kiss ass with more work experience and job titles. That way if an employer tries to jerk you around you have someone else who is willing to pay you more and be a better employer. Have your kids learn they too can be homeless if they don't do their homework when you drive past one in a box under a bridge. Let them know when you drive past a nice home they too can also choose to live here if they emulate what he or she does over a long period of time.
Also let the kids work at McDonalds or the grocery store in highschool. They learn FAST how nice a corporate job is and the value of hard work and money as well as the unfairness of life as well.
Whining on slashdot will not make the world better and employers do not care what you all think anyway.
http://saveie6.com/
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.
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.
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.
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!