Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 201 posts

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#121

Post by krapp »

Applejinx wrote: post #114

Shit, if I was an Amazon warehouse worker and had the chance to get paid the same except SOME of my workload was sitting down and shilling for Amazon on twitter, I would jump (well, sit) at the chance. It's a different kind of demanding, more like being a commercial writer, probably more open to people who are damn good commercial writers and happen to be working as a picker in an Amazon warehouse. It'd be like getti…

>Shit, if I was an Amazon warehouse worker and had the chance to get paid the same except SOME of my workload was sitting down and shilling for Amazon on twitter, I would jump (well, sit) at the chance.

They probably wouldn't let you sit down, unless you were shilling on your lunch break. Amazon has a policy against their warehouse workers sitting down while on the job, not even HR is allowed to sit when they're staffing the front.

You can squat though, and I've tried to get around it by sitting seiza.

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#122

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

eksemplar wrote: post #68

Had anyone ever done a piece of investigative journalism on the actual conditions at Amazon? A company that big will have some terrible managers, and the fact that it’s not discovering those easily, is problematic, but that doesn’t mean the entire company is rotten. I’m a manager in a Scandinavian municipality, and because I work with lean and efficiency I get to see all sides of our operation. I’ve seen departments…

> That doesn’t mean the overall working conditions are bad at the municipality. In fact we score 9/10 in employment satisfaction. This in itself is a bit of a problem though, because it’s higher than it should be, but that’s another story.

That's not another story at all, it completely undermines your point. "We can't be doing so bad because we score well on this metric (oh BTW this metric is obviously being gamed somehow)" does not convince me that you're actually doing okay at all.

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#123

Post by krapp »

FC_Associate wrote: post #64
jancsika wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone above wrote this: > People get bathroom breaks, but those count against your rate, and people do sometimes get written up for taking them, although that's as much a matter of Amazon encouraging ruthlessness in management as anything. I know of one anecdotal story of a worker who was apparently written up for the time it took them to clean up after their own nosebleed. Does this ring true to you?

So I want to be very clear that based on extensive reports I've read in the press, and anecdotes that have been shared online, what krapp said definitely goes on, but no, personally I have never witnessed that. There are two main reasons why it's possible that I've never run across such cases, the most logical one being that I've worked primarily in a Delivery Station and not a Fulfillment Center. From what I've expe…

I think the truth of the matter is, Amazon's network is big enough to allow a significant amount of variance in employee experience (despite Amazon itself being culturally adamant about reducing variance as much as possible.)

Some workers do wind up camping in their cars and peeing in bottles to make rate, most don't. What people wind up complaining about tend to be exceptions rather than the rule, but those exceptions do exist.

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#124

Post by alexozer »

agwa wrote: post #43

Let's say you're a company with a serious PR problem about the working conditions in your warehouses. You set up 15 Twitter accounts claiming to be employees of your warehouses. You make sure the accounts are laughably bad at concealing the fact that they are shills, with cookie-cutter bios and responses that are obviously canned talking points. This ensures that the accounts are discovered and written up by various…

I think "never attribute to intelligence which can adequately be explained by stupidity" applies here.

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#125

Post by krapp »

TangoTrotFox wrote: post #113
sireat wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer lies in unequal bargaining power, public shaming/awareness is the best we can do. There's the added irony of Mr. Bezos publicly the richest man in the world having his workers hold their pee. Amazon will not care about its least protected workers until Amazon feels the backlash in lowered sales. If your locality has Amazon warehouse as the largest employer your options are quite limited. It is similar to h…

What do people actually propose as an alternative? By all accounts it seems like the media examples of things such as 'peeing in bottles' are extremely isolated incidents and not representative of normal working conditions. Anywhere that has hundreds of thousands of employees - you're going to be able to find some crazy isolated anecdotes. The labor we're talking about is literally moving boxes. How much should a box…

>The labor we're talking about is literally moving boxes. How much should a box mover get paid?

The thing is, there is the value of a job to the employer, and the value of employment to the employee.

I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a full time employee, at the very least, to be paid a living wage. Someone willing to commit that much of their life to a company should be compensated enough to allow them to house and feed themselves. Even if they're just "moving boxes."

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#126

Post by Y_Y »

nickthemagicman wrote: post #83
jakobegger wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing how well this works despite being obvious propaganda. I felt my own opinion on Amazon Fullfilment Centers change as I read the article. One thing that makes propaganda like this so effective is that journalists generally do not bother to verify any propaganda claims (eg. does Amazon really pay 30% more?), so even if they write articles making fun of you they still repeat your message.

It's a gish gallop. No one has time/energy to verify it all and they're not providing any proof.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

I wish I had a debating technique named after me.

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#127

Post by anoncoward111 »

kpil wrote: post #119
anoncoward111 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm so glad I canceled my Amazon membership. I don't want anyone working in these conditions. My items can wait a few days to ship

I wont't buy anything from Amazon. Period. Grand Tour is my weak point though...

Torrents are your friend!

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#128

Post by bgie »

regul8 wrote: post #98

Ok, so who’s pointing a gun at anyone’s head and saying you HAVE TO WORK at an Amazon fulfillment center? This isn’t slavery, it’s free will. Slavery, at least in civilized countries, ended CENTURIES ago! I could delve deeper into the psychology that leads to feelings of entrapment, but I won’t. As humans, we need to get over ourselves. Work is hard. Life is hard. But it can be rewarding too, so long as you stop play…

Economic freedom only starts at middle class and above. (Like when your family can risk $300.000 for your online book store)

For the poor, you are free to choose your boss (and agree to obey thus sign away your freedom) or sink deeper into poverty and eventually starve to death...

Though there is no gun involved, I would not call this freedom.

But a kind of freedom which (thankfully) still exists is the freedom to reach out to others. So why would you oppose people that use their freedom to push back against obvious mistreatment (in this case by spreading the word)?

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#129

Post by mtmail »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #19
heroprotagonist wrote: post #18

I wonder if the recruiters for these “totally optional roles” are the sort who would also provide helpful reminders that wearing 15 pieces of flair is just the bare minimum. > Look, we want you to express yourself, okay? Now if you feel that the bare minimum is enough, then okay. But some people choose to wear more and we encourage that, okay? You do want to express yourself, don't you? -- Office Space, 1999 I can al…

On the upside, I recently learned that the actual restaurant chain that inspired that bit quietly did away with flair after the movie came out. /apropos of nothing

That was TGI Friday's according to http://mentalfloss.com/article/61686/20-things-you-might-not...

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#130

Post by walrus01 »

Applejinx wrote: post #120
walrus01 wrote: post #2

Well that's not creepy at all. Tweets read like they're written by a PR agency. Never known a near-minimum-wage warehouse worker who answers tweets with turns of phrase like "On the contrary..."

I live in Vermont, running an open source Patreon project that isn't designed to maximize capital. I know lots and LOTS of minimum wage or near-minimum-age people, and a good selection of much wealthier people. Right now I'm substantially below minimum wage as a sole proprietor, but managing it. Obviously I cannot hire in these conditions, so I don't. I see NO correlation between that and intelligence, verbal profici…

No, what I was trying to say is that an average actual non astroturfing warehouse worker wouldn't answer questions like a trained PR lackey. Read the tweets, the sentence structure, phrasing and uniformity in writing styles between supposedly distinct individuals is obvious.
Post reply on HN