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Brutal life working in Amazon warehouse

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Re: Brutal life working in Amazon warehouse

#101

Post by TheHegemon »

colechristensen wrote: post #78
CamelCaseName wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the government were to offer PTO for employees below a certain income threshold to learn new work-related skills, would that help lift people out of these situations? Or would such a system be 1. too invasive and 2. abused, either by companies or the employees.

That's a weird way to do it, and would tend to subsidize employers for questionable benefits. Tax incentives for employer tuition reimbursement makes more sense. Instead there should be programs to pay people minimum wage + tuition to attend community college for in-demand-career related degrees.

> Tax incentives for employer tuition reimbursement makes more sense.

Just when you thought tuition costs couldn't go any higher...

Re: Brutal life working in Amazon warehouse

#102

Post by mgleason_3 »

user5994461 wrote: post #8
atonse wrote: post #2

Is it just me or is Amazon turning out to be even more evil than Walmart ever was? It's just cuz they're an "innovative" tech company, that we let them get away with it?

Warehouses were always terrible, borderline cruel at some places. Amazon didn't invent them.

Hmm, I’ve seen quite a few warehouses and they’ve mostly been clean, decent places to work. Not the highest skill or wage work, but certainly not terrible or cruel. But, they weren’t major shipping depots for Amazon either. Mostly small/mid-sized.

In one, a subcontractor doing installations for DTV, the warehouse staff workload was pretty light. Sure, they’d hump a bit in the morning and evening to the installers checked out and back in, but the rest of the day was light.

Certainly no overtime. And CALOSHA is quite strict in their rules. I don’t recall a single injury in the warehouse.

Now the installers generally worked quite hard - the good ones completing installations 3-4 per day.

Re: Brutal life working in Amazon warehouse

#103

Post by noam87 »

pkaler wrote: post #80

Brutal? Sounds like a regular blue collar job. I worked as a sparkwatch at a plywood plant in high school. Basically, a welder’s assistant. This is what regular blue collar jobs look like. You work 12 hour shifts. The machinery is hot. There is constant dust in the air. You are on your feet the entire time. It’s 30ºC in the summer. It’s -20ºC in the winter. People in Sillicon Valley and especially the press are just…

> Brutal? Sounds like a regular blue collar job.

Which is to say: brutality is regular.

While of course the current move towards exposing harassment in the office is important, I don't hear much recognition that the people getting the most benefit are those whose prospects are already cushy to begin with... how much of this is actually "tricking down" to people working in often dehumanizing conditions?

I worked minimum wage until my mid-20's, and most of my high school friends didn't do college (or even graduate high school, in some cases); my parents (who both hold degrees) also worked in warehouses and stuff like that for a while when we first immigrated. In many jobs, being treated like trash, bullied, etc. is the norm. Being constantly talked down to and treated like a child is certainly the norm. And the sexual harassment stories are also much more frequent, and much worse. But people at the lower rungs don't have the social capital to take to Twitter safely, jump ship to a different company, etc. Doing so risks losing next month's bills, losing a good reference, etc. So it's just the way it is.

And I'm talking here in Canada where we have much better worker protection laws, so I can only assume it's even worse in the US.

Same with workplace safety. Sure, on paper you have the right to refuse unsafe work. But don't be surprised if all of a sudden you start getting less hours or get reprimanded for "not being a team player" or some crap.

Re: Brutal life working in Amazon warehouse

#104

Post by token_throwaway »

zemo wrote: post #48
token_throwaway wrote: post #42

This job sounds shitty but have you ever spoken to someone in a domestic role? A postal employee? A trucker? A janitor at your office building? Kitchen staff at a restaurant who do not even have time to take a piss without dropping the ball, let alone timed pee breaks? Lots of jobs are hard. Extremely hard. And often, jobs that are very very hard pay hardly anything. There is a two-way transaction happening here, tho…

this is extremely, extremely tone-deaf. > As long as people are willing to do this job for this amount of money, it will probably not get better unfortunately. child labor didn't stop because parents stopped being willing to sentence their kids to labor, it stopped because of laws. The free market does nothing to guarantee that working conditions are livable or humane. Any suggestion to the contrary is at best naive,…

Unfortunately people are really bad at assessing scale, so they forget that there are always going to be people who "have to" do this kind of job. Always. The goal should be to give people the choices to not end up this way. It is extremely harsh. But life is harsh. We should do what we can as a people to push equality of opportunity, but if we look for equality of outcome, we're just burying our heads in the sand re: the harshness of the world.

Re: Brutal life working in Amazon warehouse

#105

Post by DanBC »

sneak wrote: post #77
holydude wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am against excessive taxation or overregulation but companies like Amazon ...no really any company...should be responsible for treating the society fair. Amazon is a behemoth that grew because of its ruthless behavior towards its competitors. I am sure there is more to life than constant race to the bottom when your average american has to compete with someone from china or africa.

How can you treat someone unfairly when they are not compelled to interact with you at all? Every single person who has a job with Amazon is there because they choose to be.

> Every single person who has a job with Amazon is there because they choose to be.

That's not necessarily the case in the UK where people claiming unemployment benefits are compelled to spend 35 hours a week searching and applying for jobs.

Someone in that regime may well have applied to work at Amazon because they would have had a benefit sanction otherwise.

Re: Brutal life working in Amazon warehouse

#106

Post by CamelCaseName »

TheHegemon wrote: post #101
colechristensen wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a weird way to do it, and would tend to subsidize employers for questionable benefits. Tax incentives for employer tuition reimbursement makes more sense. Instead there should be programs to pay people minimum wage + tuition to attend community college for in-demand-career related degrees.

> Tax incentives for employer tuition reimbursement makes more sense. Just when you thought tuition costs couldn't go any higher...

Perhaps large employers could negotiate better rates?

Sounds like a great way to increase offer acceptance rates too.

Re: Brutal life working in Amazon warehouse

#107

Post by user5994461 »

jjeaff wrote: post #68
Asooka wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Amazon should retire the one-click same-day offer as well, if it requires this level of human misery to fulfil. Personally I've never received a package in less than two weeks and I still shop at Amazon since they have the best availability and prices.

There is no additional labor involved in shipping a package in 1 day vs 7 days. It's just that the stores that take 7 days to ship operate Perpetually behind schedule. To get products out in 1 day, you need enough slack to handle the times when things get busy so you don't get behind. There is no inherent need to abuse employees to do that. I have an online store and we always ship within a few hours of receiving the…

Bullshit. It takes crazy amount of labor to ship in one day instead of the usual 2-3 days.

It requires employees on shift every night to handle any package immediately. It requires employees to work on Saturday and Sunday to cover week end orders. It requires employees to do longer hours to complete any burst of orders at any time.

What do you think happen to items that are not in the vicinity? They have to be transported overnight across hundreds of miles to a closer distribution center. Again, night and high pressure work.

Re: Brutal life working in Amazon warehouse

#108

Post by xg15 »

pkaler wrote: post #80

Brutal? Sounds like a regular blue collar job. I worked as a sparkwatch at a plywood plant in high school. Basically, a welder’s assistant. This is what regular blue collar jobs look like. You work 12 hour shifts. The machinery is hot. There is constant dust in the air. You are on your feet the entire time. It’s 30ºC in the summer. It’s -20ºC in the winter. People in Sillicon Valley and especially the press are just…

I'm sure the warehouse workers spend a bit more time on jobs like this than a stint in highschool once.

Re: Brutal life working in Amazon warehouse

#109

Post by srean »

zemo wrote: post #48
token_throwaway wrote: post #42

This job sounds shitty but have you ever spoken to someone in a domestic role? A postal employee? A trucker? A janitor at your office building? Kitchen staff at a restaurant who do not even have time to take a piss without dropping the ball, let alone timed pee breaks? Lots of jobs are hard. Extremely hard. And often, jobs that are very very hard pay hardly anything. There is a two-way transaction happening here, tho…

this is extremely, extremely tone-deaf. > As long as people are willing to do this job for this amount of money, it will probably not get better unfortunately. child labor didn't stop because parents stopped being willing to sentence their kids to labor, it stopped because of laws. The free market does nothing to guarantee that working conditions are livable or humane. Any suggestion to the contrary is at best naive,…

A law without a budget to support enforcement does not do much. It again comes down to economics - the balance of risks vs returns. This is of course obvious. What provokes me to mention the obvious is the count of politicians/governments who grandstand on issues, pass laws but do not back it with a budget. These are mostly PR exercises.

Re: Brutal life working in Amazon warehouse

#110

Post by DanBC »

tryingagainbro wrote: post #93

>>I found staff asleep on their feet, exhausted from toiling for up to 55 hours a week. What's brutal is their salary, £8.2 an hour, but 55 hours in the busiest season is called brutal? Please.

55 hours is very long for Europe.

European working times directive limits the maximum hours to 48 hours a week, although people can opt out of that.

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