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Amazon doesn't 'employ' drivers, but hired firms to prevent them from unionizing

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Re: Amazon doesn't 'employ' drivers, but hired firms to prevent them from unionizing

#141

Post by bena »

jtreminio wrote: post #28
bluedino wrote: post #12

I'm always amazed at the stark differences between UPS drivers, and Amazon drivers. UPS trucks are always clean. They follow the rules of the road. The drivers wear neat uniforms, they walk on the sidewalks, they're polite, they're just professionals held to a higher standard. Then there are Amazon drivers. They park blocking half the road, music blasting, the vans usually look like they haven't been washed in a mont…

> music blasting Far be it from me to say a driver can't listen to music while they are at work. > the vans usually look like they haven't been washed in a month Good. Washing work vehicles so that they are always sparkling seems like a waste of resources. > Reminds me of fast food employee who simply hands your meal out the window, no greeting, no thank you, no smile This is such a weird American fixation. Here, tak…

I'm like 50/50 here.

Listen to music, but not so loud as to be unaware of your surroundings.

Washing a vehicle is about more than aesthetics. Dirt, salt, asphalt, etc, can damage the vehicle itself. Delivery vans also get a lot of miles on them. It doesn't need to "sparkle", but if you've got a month's worth of dirt and grime on the truck, it's not great either.

I don't need a whole song and dance with transactions either. But silence doesn't work either. Enough words to conduct the transaction and acknowledge it is over.

Re: Amazon doesn't 'employ' drivers, but hired firms to prevent them from unionizing

#142

Post by tech_ken »

epivosism wrote: post #35
oldjim69 wrote: post #11

Nothing shows the power of unions more than the lengths companies go to fight them. In a Union there is Strength.

This sounds like just the opposite of a capitalist monopoly from the other side. Why would I want any party to control the way a market works? You'll get stagnation both ways. see many historical examples where both monopolies and unions refused change and were overturned, leading to failures. i.e. Detroit I want a functioning competitive market where workers and firms compete and have to adjust and innovate to fit w…

But the problem is that the labor "market" has many weird inefficiencies not found in the usual "buyer X selling widget Y" model of the free market. For example, the poorer you are the less elasticity you have in your labor "product"; by the mere necessity of paying rent and buying food you have to accept virtually any offer that comes your way. On the other hand, employers often negotiate from a position of substantial strength because of their deep capital reserves. I'd consider this a market distortion, and a harmful one at that. Labor laws and unions provide counterbalance which is important to ensuring a healthy labor market.

Re: Amazon doesn't 'employ' drivers, but hired firms to prevent them from unionizing

#143

Post by altairprime »

BaseballPhysics wrote: post #126
altairprime wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Unsmiling” is not “unprofessional”. Smiling isn’t about courtesy, respect, or professionalism. It’s a US cultural habit that is not universal in the rest of the world, ingrained into service industries, in service of demands that workers subsume all emotion in favor of providing “service with a smile”. Covid masking protocols were looked upon fondly by service industry workers specifically because they didn’t have t…

> “Unsmiling” is not “unprofessional". And now we're back to cultural norms and expectations, and there's no point in arguing about something so very subjective. The original complaint was about "weird" Americans and my entire point was that it's not that weird, it's just different. And now we're just around and back where we started. I've offered my perspective and there's little point in repeating it again. If you…

Please don’t frame your personal disinterest in discussing subjective viewpoints that contradict your own, as though everyone at HN becomes disinterested in discussing subjective viewpoints once disagreement occurs.

HN users regularly discuss conflicting subjective cultural norms and expectations: when discussing Linux window managers, emacs, tabs versus spaces, the expectations of junior engineers in a startup, how much oncall is too much, the exact bytes of the new SVG logo when it first launched, and your own subjective viewpoint expressed above: whether smiles are a necessary part of courtesy at all.

Re: Amazon doesn't 'employ' drivers, but hired firms to prevent them from unionizing

#144

Post by chrisnight »

BaseballPhysics wrote: post #106
sfcarrot wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is no matter how genuinly your delivery driver ask "hi how can I help", he/she does not care about it. There is simply no time for him to care about it. Otherwise, you will see your delivery fee increase since.

Great! Delivery fees are already unsustainably low. Getting a product to my door cannot possibly be free ! That cost is simply being borne somewhere. And since the cost of products isn't rising (or wasn't until COVID), then those costs are being borne elsewhere, and that very much includes the workers who are seeing lower salaries, longer hours, and worse working conditions. So I say yes, please, bring on the shippin…

> Great! Delivery fees are already unsustainably low.

Just where are you from? Sure, I see delivery fees that are "free", which means they're included with the cost of the product. But any time I see a delivery fee tacked on, it's almost always in the double digits, many times up in the 20-30s for a box that is about the size of an Micro ATX computer case.

Not to mention when I have to ship stuff internationally myself and it goes into the triple digits, not even doing UPS which would have costed almost half a grand.

Edit: And I'm just in the US

Re: Amazon doesn't 'employ' drivers, but hired firms to prevent them from unionizing

#145

Post by stefantalpalaru »

mcpackieh wrote: post #97
Zircom wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As a Canadian cousin over here, if you can't tell the difference between a smile/a polite "Hi, how can I help you?"/a "have a nice day", and an actual conversation involving smalltalk, then you clearly don't know about what you're criticising. That's literally his point, the whole friendly-service-with-a-smile thing is forced on them by their managers/corporate, it's not from a sincere desire to have an actual conve…

Businesses have policies that you're supposed to do this for the same reason that businesses have policies that you're not supposed to spit on people; basic human decency needs to be encoded because some minority of people won't go for it otherwise. Being pleasant to strangers even when you're having a bad day is basic human decency, and of course it's supposed to go both ways. If I'm a customer at a burger shop and…

[dead]

Re: Amazon doesn't 'employ' drivers, but hired firms to prevent them from unionizing

#146

Post by tech_ken »

jvmfjvfjvf wrote: post #18
oldjim69 wrote: post #11

Nothing shows the power of unions more than the lengths companies go to fight them. In a Union there is Strength.

What strength do they have? Unions routinely cause jobs to be eliminated and offshored.

Well no, it's literally the employers who move their capital to regimes which allow more exploitative working arrangements to boost their profit margin. That they are so unwilling to accept a reduce share of the company's net income that they will pick up their toys and move to Bangladesh just indicates that we need to be more aggressive against capital mobility.

Re: Amazon doesn't 'employ' drivers, but hired firms to prevent them from unionizing

#148

Post by passwordoops »

jtreminio wrote: post #28
bluedino wrote: post #12

I'm always amazed at the stark differences between UPS drivers, and Amazon drivers. UPS trucks are always clean. They follow the rules of the road. The drivers wear neat uniforms, they walk on the sidewalks, they're polite, they're just professionals held to a higher standard. Then there are Amazon drivers. They park blocking half the road, music blasting, the vans usually look like they haven't been washed in a mont…

> music blasting Far be it from me to say a driver can't listen to music while they are at work. > the vans usually look like they haven't been washed in a month Good. Washing work vehicles so that they are always sparkling seems like a waste of resources. > Reminds me of fast food employee who simply hands your meal out the window, no greeting, no thank you, no smile This is such a weird American fixation. Here, tak…

Weird how a conversation that should be about the richest corporations shirking their responsibilities to employees is hijacked by someone complaining about fake smiles instead

Re: Amazon doesn't 'employ' drivers, but hired firms to prevent them from unionizing

#149

Post by BaseballPhysics »

alvarezbjm-hn wrote: post #119
BaseballPhysics wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's literally his point, the whole friendly-service-with-a-smile thing is forced on them by their managers/corporate, Courtesy with customers is forced on them? My god! The next thing you'll tell me they're expected not to curse at their co-workers, too! What kind of world is this?! > it's not from a sincere desire to have an actual conversation with customers. Once again, and as I already said in the very text…

"Courtesy with customers is forced on them? My god!" I worked in a call center for two years, for three different companies. Yes, (fake) courtesy is forced . The customers of one site were so difficult that courtesy was scripted (there were scripted interactions for frustrated and for rude customers)

Well you have clearly missed the point of my comment.

Yes, it's "forced" on them, in the same way that many many other behavioural expectations are "forced" on a worker. They're "forced" not to abuse their co-workers. They're "forced" to treat their workplace with respect. They're "forced" to dress in a certain way.

That's called "having a job", and it's all stuff I've had to do, too, in every job I've ever had.

Re: Amazon doesn't 'employ' drivers, but hired firms to prevent them from unionizing

#150

Post by mcpackieh »

jtreminio wrote: post #28
bluedino wrote: post #12

I'm always amazed at the stark differences between UPS drivers, and Amazon drivers. UPS trucks are always clean. They follow the rules of the road. The drivers wear neat uniforms, they walk on the sidewalks, they're polite, they're just professionals held to a higher standard. Then there are Amazon drivers. They park blocking half the road, music blasting, the vans usually look like they haven't been washed in a mont…

> music blasting Far be it from me to say a driver can't listen to music while they are at work. > the vans usually look like they haven't been washed in a month Good. Washing work vehicles so that they are always sparkling seems like a waste of resources. > Reminds me of fast food employee who simply hands your meal out the window, no greeting, no thank you, no smile This is such a weird American fixation. Here, tak…

> Far be it from me to say a driver can't listen to music while they are at work.

If they're listening at a volume where it isn't noticed by / bothering other people, then there's no problem. Otherwise, it's noise pollution. Trucks are too loud as it is, we don't need even more noise thrown into the mix. Whether it's people playing music through their phone speakers on a city bus, or a guy reving his unmuffled motorcycle at 4:30 in the morning every day, or somebody blasting heavy bass music through their car or truck speakers when they slowly cruise through through your neighborhood, it's all assholish behavior.

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