Amazon driver quits over AI-powered safety cameras in delivery vehicles

It's true that bottom-rung Amazon workers are low-skilled and not in a very strong bargaining position. But they still need certain aptitudes, competencies and physical fitness levels to be able to carry out the work effectively, which means they will have options other than working for Amazon. Your claim is effectively that there is a limitless supply of people who are competent/able-bodied enough to do the job Amazon needs, but at the same time so desperate for any kind work that they will tolerate any level of mistreatment. This just doesn't hold water, and nobody in this thread has provided solid evidence for it. People just keep implying this is the case and assuming it to be self-evident.

> Two responses to this:

> 1. Will they? Why are they not intervening now?

Companies are subject to local, state and federal labor laws everywhere they operate, and governments, regulators and courts everywhere are perpetually looking at what needs to be done to bring about reasonable improvements in pay and conditions for workers. This article [1] describes changes in NY and California to bring about criminal prosecutions for wage theft. Criminal liability also applies in some places for workplace health and safety breaches. Could/should more be done? Sure. But your suggestion that companies like Amazon operate free of any regulatory oversight or consequence is false.

> 2. A fine is a price. If they save two million dollars, at the cost of a $200,000 fine, they just profited to the tune of $1.8 million dollars.

Can you cite an example of this with Amazon or a similarly large company? As far as I know this is false, when it comes to labor laws. Companies that continue to commit the same breaches face increasingly severe penalties, and in some cases the potential for criminal prosecution against the company operators.

> Their incentives are always about making money. If abusing their employees makes them money

You're trying to prove your point by looking at just one factor in isolation of all the others. Sure, companies exist to make money. But they need to think about legal issues, employee retention, brand/reputation/media coverage, company culture, management self-respect...

Your last sentence is just gross. It's fascinating when people need to resort to vile imagery to get their point across.

[1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/prosecutors...

https://reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/mfrbty/hi_im_vic_a_former...

Notable q & a:

> Have you gotten in trouble via the camera?

> I haven't personally, because I didn't really drive with them for long enough. However, some other drivers did and I was there while it happened. They are shown their camera feed (in front of other drivers), called out, yelled at, and told to fix whatever issues the camera's AI recognizes under threat of losing their jobs.

- The campaign to enforce speed limits has been going on for decades; there's no "recently" about it.

- They do update speed limits to what is deemed safe on different roads, and there is constant research and discussion about what speed levels are appropriate, along with published correlations of speed limits with fatality figures, and consideration of practices in other countries.

- I live in s state that supposedly penalises you if you exceed the limit by more than about 3kph. I've been fined a couple of times in recent years, since I moved out of the city into the suburbs. I wasn't fined for 3kph breach, more like 6. The fine is now AUD $207 for exceeding the speed limit by up to 10kph. It was annoying, sure, but I've learned to be more careful about keeping to the limit, and haven't had a fine for over 2 years. I don't stare at the speedo. Nobody does. In city roads it's usually hard to exceed the limit anyway due to traffic, and on open roads I use cruise control. It's no big deal.

Meanwhile, the fatality figures continue to decrease year on year.

The notion that traffic fines are a scam to raise government revenue doesn't hold much water. Traffic fines make up less than 1.5% of state revenue in Victoria, and it is spent on road upgrades to improve safety and traffic conditions.

> As an analogy, this means that if I were Mr. Amazon and stole $20 from one of my employees, my fine would be half a penny, except that fine includes every other illegal thing I'd gotten caught doing that year.

That's no analogy. You're implying that every last cent of revenue earned by Amazon amounts to theft. Sure, take that line of rhetoric if you want, but it's not a serious discussion of the issues and doesn't do anything to help address any real problems for workers.

Taking the most recent case - the $61.7M fine handed down in Feb this year - that fine amounted to 100% of the money they were found to have withheld from drivers.

Which means the claim that Amazon can deliberately and continuously underpay and mistreat workers, write off any fines and "costs of doing business" and face no significant consequences is false. $61M is a lot of money for anyone, even Amazon, they gained nothing from it, and indeed would have lost a whole lot more money defending the case, as well as in their reputation among potential workers.

If I haven't made this clear already, I'm not for one second claiming that Amazon is free of any wrongdoing, that pay and conditions for Amazon workers are always adequate, or that the economic system and regulatory oversight mechanisms always function well. I'm just pushing back on the claims that every last thing that Amazon ever does amounts to gravely sinister assault on perpetually defenceless victims, and that they never face consequences for wrongdoing. Things can still be bad without having to be quite that bad.