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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."
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.
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.
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
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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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.
My life in a nutshell when I was working in a medical warehouse. With the introduction of voice picking, the company decided to raise our minimum quota to 87% of whatever the computer told us we should be doing. That's like failing a class if you get a B.
Nobody was getting 100% even under the best of conditions, and it was hard to work at all with mandatory 14-15 hour shifts every day. That's especially hard with voice recognition so bad the system couldn't tell the difference between "yes" and "no". The headphone volume would dynamically change on its own, so the speaker constantly varied between a whisper to a lawnmower-like scream. The dynamic volume adjustment (to account for background noise) pissed me off the most. The computer would scream so loud I was afraid it would literally damage my hearing. There was no way to configure the system to have a consistent volume.
After 10 years with the company, I was told my performance was below 87%, and I had two weeks to improve it or I'd be fired. I quit on the spot.
Everybody knows that it's now or never
Everybody knows that it's me or you
And everybody knows that you live forever
When you've done a line or two
Everybody knows the deal is rotten
Old Black Joe's still pickin' cotton
For your ribbons and bows
And everybody knows
and everybody knows
-
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/
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/
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.
> 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.
Yes, it's a standard technique for gathering information when writing a book. You hear that there are problems at Amazon, so decide to verify it for yourself and gain a greater insight than you can get just from talking to other people. It also gives you an opportunity to test the limits of the system, to ask for better conditions to see what the reaction is and so forth.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.