Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#361

Post by ThrustVectoring » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 6:02 PM UTC

CamTin wrote: post #268

gimmeDatCheddar wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average working class American is financing their car. The average car payment is $500. That is way too much car, yet people are financing that. Over the average working career, this $500 per month represents a foregone multi-million dollar net worth at retirement. So the average working class American is poor or struggling for cash not because of income issues, but because of spending issues. We have a spending…

I can't find a way that $500 per month adds up to "multi-million dollar net worth". Even at a very optimistic 10% return rate, it comes to just over 1.1 million over thirty years. What assumptions are you making in your calculation to come up with 2million+ at retirement from $500 per month of savings?

In order to finance a dollar of monthly spending, you need roughly $300 invested. Actual returns are generally somewhat higher, due to requiring a lower amount of variance to handle sequence-of-returns risk in distribution, but the rule of thumb holds. Which suggests the car-buying habit puts you roughly $150k in the hole.

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#362

Post by rodionos » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 6:04 PM UTC

Here's the largest Nescafe plant in the world, located in Southern Russia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzxjMxKUvIg

Check out some of the jobs on offer:

18:15 - the coffee tasting job

22:30 - the optical controller job

The latter one is crazy. The video doesn't make it clear why it's not automated.

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#363

Post by frgtpsswrdlame » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 6:06 PM UTC

conanbatt wrote: post #236

temp-dude-87844 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Marx and Engels did accurately identify that a large reserve of under-employed workers, or people who didn't previously participate in the labor force, is what enables the most exploitative jobs. All necessities in life cost money: food, housing, childcare, healthcare; and those in the most precarious social positions are the people most willing to accept abusive employment for reasons directly tied to their su…

Please, the world had 94% extreme poverty in their time, and its down to less than 10%. The model of exploitation they have cannot possible account for that. I have tremendous sympathy for the empathic pain they had by seeing those levels of exploitation. Das Kapital's first volume is basically 50% accounts of child labor and exploitation. But they had no way to know that when the state holds the capital the results…

>had marx seen the soviet union at its prime he would have probably revised his own theory.

Actually I don't think so. Even Marx saw that socialism was a stage of history which followed from capitalism. In the same way that feudalism's aristocracy provides the conditions which create a merchant class that eventually overthrows the aristocracy, Marx sees capitalism and capitalists as providing the conditions which create a working class which eventually overthrows the capitalists. He would probably be annoyed with the soviets for trying to skip most of a phase and he would probably be annoyed with us, modern westerners, for not recognizing where in history we are - with rising inequality, increasing productivity but stagnating wages and the general increasing returns to capital.

>Marx's reserve army doesn't hold water.

Doesn't it? With chronic unemployment persisting since our most recent crash and now that we're finally reaching low unemployment ten years later, wages haven't moved much. If you explained the idea without mentioning Marx I think most people on the street would intuitively agree.

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#364

Post by ThrustVectoring » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 6:08 PM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #332

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #47

My fear is that the future of work for most people is not unemployment, but shitty jobs like this. My feeling is that in order to avoid this and prosper, the people need to own the robots that do all the work (Marxism heyy). If robots provide huge productivity gains, then they will provide those gains for their owners. If it’s the big corporations that own them, they will see the gains. But as long as people are trea…

Thinking about what "owning the robots" might actually look like, the easiest way I can think to solve it would be for the government to buy index funds and use the proceeds to fund basic income. This wouldn't own any robots from privately-owned companies, though.

Privately-owned companies not having publicly available shares for sale isn't really a barrier for the government - they write the tax laws. If the US government wants a piece of their profits, they can get it.

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#365

Post by aylmao » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 6:08 PM UTC

StaticRedux wrote: post #263

hueving wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>On the other side of the coin, if they hadn't spent the money on reinvesting, they wouldnt be the size they are now or employ as many people. Where is the evidence? Whose to say how much faster they would have grown without the employee misery and churn?

> Where is the evidence? Basic math? If you have $1 million to spend (as an example), and you can open a new store and hire more employees at a lesser rate, or pay your current employees more and not open a new store: opening a new store = growth and more people hired + more revenue paying your current employees more = less "employee misery and churn" and no growth + less revenue

> no growth + less revenue

I'd argue it's more like *slower growth, which should be acceptable, especially at Amazon's size.

Also, I'd in fact argue that making sure your employees have time to go pee wont significantly hurt your bottom line. At most you might need to hire a few few more people. Amazon operates at numbers big enough that this shouldn't be a considerable expense.

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#366

Post by dsfyu404ed » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 6:09 PM UTC

philbarr wrote: post #91

jrochkind1 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wait, you're sure there are many industries, white and blue collar, where workers routinely pee in bottles as a job requirement? Really? In the U.S.? You're pretty sure about this, eh? Many industries? I'd be curious to hear an example of one industry where "white collar" workers routinely pee in bottles as a job requirement, official or unofficial.

My dev team are all forced to use the same bottle to save time. The one who tops it off and has to go off to empty it is docked pay.

My dev team used to have urinals in our cubes but HR didn't think it was a sufficiently gender-equitable solution so now we are back to trash cans.

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#367

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 6:10 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #356

piracykills wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so - over-prescription of opioids and more common usage of fentanyl seem to the be the key factors in the death increases. Nothing to do with underlying socioeconomic conditions nor societal problems. I don't understand how you're making that leap - care to elaborate?

The Guardian has an excellent piece far better than me rehashing it. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/28/deaths-of-de... “Is the US facing an epidemic of 'deaths of despair'? These researchers say yes”

[deleted]

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#368

Post by amyjess » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 6:10 PM UTC

balls187 wrote: post #283

amyjess wrote: post #193

I have a friend who used to work at a fulfillment center. In December, she took a week of medical leave. Last month, they retroactively denied her leave and then fired her for having a negative UPT balance. She'd worked there for years. It's an awful, abusive company, and even though Trump's reasons for going after Amazon are the wrong reasons, I hope he successfully gets them shut down anyway.

She wasn't covered by FMLA?

I don't know the details.

She also told me that a couple of her other coworkers got fired the same way, and she and a couple of her ex-coworkers were talking about how it's something Amazon does periodically. Apparently that's how they cull people management doesn't like if they don't have a real reason to fire them.

Edit: Here's a writeup by somebody else this almost happened to. https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/home/harassing...

Edit again: Another https://www.reddit.com/r/amazon/comments/5pegzc/amazon_wrong...

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#369

Post by Sea_Wulf » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 6:12 PM UTC

laythea wrote: post #301

kajumix wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Judging from some of the comments here, software engineers working in Amazon must either be stupid or irrational to continue working there, given the market for software engineers. Amazon is a highly successful company with significant anticipate growth still to come. All that success doesn't come without talent. So maybe not stupid, maybe just irrational? Tech companies in general, and Amazon in particular, are high…

Does the treatment outlined in the article apply to just warehouse workers or does this policy apply to software engineers/office bods also? (pee in a bottle etc?)

There have been reports of toxic management [0] and at least one suicide attempt over the years [1], which indicates that the problem is not purely on the warehouse floor.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...

[1] http://fortune.com/2016/11/29/amazon-employee-suicide-attemp...

Re: Amazon warehouse workers 'peed in bottles' fearing punishment for taking breaks

#370

Post by vkou » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 6:12 PM UTC

wutbrodo wrote: post #308

vkou wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The model of exploitation they have cannot possible account for that. No, what accounts for that is access to incredibly cheap energy, in the form of fossil fuels and electrification. Energy is what lifted people out of poverty, not any of that other nonsense. Without coal, oil, and hydro power, most of us would still be subsistence peasants, regardless of whether or not we would live in Communism, Feudalism, Capit…

Out of curiosity, what is your model for the dramatic examples of India and China, which were faced with relative stagnation and incredibly dire, largely-intractable poverty for decades after WWII; followed by liberalizing (incrementally) their markets and explosive growth+massive declines in extreme poverty thereafter? I don't know a ton about the economic history of these two countries, but prima facie this seems t…

India's explosive growth [1] followed electrification, not lead it. [2] It's 'intractable poverty' following WWII was only 'intractable' because of colonial exploitation - the British Empire squeezed it for cheap resources, labour, and wealth (By forcing Indian markets open to imports, and by banning some forms of local production - Gandhi's salt march was an example of resistance to that.) At the same time, the empire did not actually invest in the same kind of infrastructure that Europe enjoyed for close to a century.

China's a bit of a different case - but for contrast, compare it to the USSR. Despite three decades of war, civil war, near-genocidal purges, and some more war, by the 60s and 70s, it has lifted millions of people out of a similar level of intractable poverty. Again, not on the back of its economic system, but on the back of industrialization.

It's hard to stay poor (Compared to world poverty in the 1800s) when you have running water, indoor plumbing, and electricity.

[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/india/gdp-per-capita

[2] https://www.slideshare.net/ashishverma061/growth-of-electric... - Slide 16.