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

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

#161

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…

> Had anyone ever done a piece of investigative journalism on the actual conditions at Amazon? Sure, see https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-... for one example.

A funny memory is how the right-wing mocked this article relentlessly, before Jeff Bezos was bad in their minds. I can't wait for Alex Jones et al to become advocates for warehouse workers all of a sudden.

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

#163
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…

Being in that position for many years. Its not about they pay so much as its about the pressure to constantly be working in extremely unhealthy physical and mental way. Which takes its toll long term. Something that took me years to recover from and I'm the lucky one. Don't expect people working in factories their entire life to pick up programming/software development because their minds will be warped by the repetitive nature of all these activities, which only reinforce all their problems day to day making life even worse. All they can think about is their problems while they are mindlessly doing repetitive work.

If your going to force people to live like that, and it definitely is not a choice anyone makes you might as well give them a little dignity and not treat them like a machine. Don't put insane pressures on them leading them to pee in bottles. The rate thing is evil lets be honest. If you had to program every day certain lines of code and your performance was judged based on that and how long you went to the bathroom you would go nuts too.

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

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The questions it prompts are pretty straight forward. Does Amazon actually pay ~30% better now than their competitors (or anything close to that)? Do they offer dental, vision and healthcare coverage for all employees? If those things are true, then I think better of Amazon because of it. I would have guessed none of those things were true otherwise. The media and essentially all comments online proclaim that Amazon…

> Can anyone here speak to if those positive things are true and or mostly true? I have no idea. I still don't understand. If you have no idea whether the things they claim are true, why has your opinion of Amazon's treatment of workers improved? Is it that you don't think Amazon would be having their employees claim things that are misleading? We already have myriad claims of Amazon pressuring workers not to use the…

Because the very act of storing information in your brain gives it credence, even if you don't go through the extra effort to verify whether it is correct. With repeated exposure it can become a belief, even a belief so strong that you will hold onto it in the face of evidence it is false. This can happen to anyone; it's a fundamental feature of how our memory works.

It works especially well for information that does not affect you personally, because you're less likely to go through the extra effort to verify whether something is true.

If your boss tells you that your salary is $100k/year, you're going to check that on your paycheck!

If your boss tells you that garbage collectors make $100k a year, you might not believe it, but you might also not bother to put in the effort to check. But if you remember it later on, the very act of bringing it out of your memory will reinforce it to you.

And if you don't go specifically check on the accuracy, you're also more likely to rely on social signals like, who is telling me this? Is this a person who I identify with? Does it seem like a person or an institution I should trust?

In this case, you are reading a news article from TechCrunch, a well-known, successful, and long-running news site. Any information you read there comes wrapped in however much trust you associate with TechCrunch. So if a claim is passed on in an article, it comes with some level of default trust.

And even if you don't like TechCrunch, the default level of trust is affected just by the act of reading the article. By default we tend to trust ourselves, so when we do something (like read an article), the default trust is pushed above zero, just because we're the one who read it! This effect is why most people think they are above average drivers, for example.

So: reading an article about an ad campaign, that contains the ad and its claims, can affect how you feel about the advertised product... even though you know it's an article about an ad campaign!

In marketing this is called "earned media" and it is valuable because it hijacks your trust for the media source to support the ad claim. A spectacular example was the "Swift Boat Truth" ad against John Kerry, which barely ran on late night TV, but was widely covered by the news media. It had a huge impact on Kerry's campaign for president.

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

#166
I'm not an Amazon shill, look at my post history.

I don't understand all of this press. If you don't like your job working at Amazon, quit. If the conditions are terrible, release proof to the public, so other people don't even start working there.

Wash, rinse, repeat, and Amazon will either change the supposed working conditions or hopefully fail.

Why do we need so much press on both sides for such a non-issue?

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

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The side of Amazon that works in offices and makes good money also has a reputation as a bad place to work, compared to other major tech companies. See the "Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk" article from the NYT a few years back. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-... Anecdotally, as you say, that does seem to depend a lot on your department--good local management ca…

That's the way to get the warehouse workers to comply. Arguably it's BETTER (certainly more effective) if it's that way all the way up the chain, because you'll get buy-in if the lower rungs see that the upper rungs of the latter are pushing themselves just as hard or harder. If Jeff Bezos cries at his desk, into his apparently meaningless kabillions of dollars, because he just CAN'T quite keep up with what he expect…

This matches a recent experience of mine working on a dev team at a large tech company. We joked about ADD or "Abuse-Driven Development," because we would always hear our bosses say, "X needs to be in tomorrow or I'm going to get screamed at," "Okay, which of these is going to be a bigger beating if it's missing," "I live and die by this product," "It's my ass that's on the line for this," etc. Not only that, but they would brag about how little they were being paid and how late they worked every day. We would get emails from them after 1AM regularly. I never encountered any behavior like that at any other company.

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

#168
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…

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.

Note the tweet says they pay 30% more than "traditional retail stores". I don't think that's the right comparison. Pick & pack in a warehouse is much more physically demanding than being on the floor at Best Buy. The better question is do they pay more than UPS, or for that matter, picking strawberries?

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

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Had anyone ever done a piece of investigative journalism on the actual conditions at Amazon? Sure, see https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-... for one example.

A funny memory is how the right-wing mocked this article relentlessly, before Jeff Bezos was bad in their minds. I can't wait for Alex Jones et al to become advocates for warehouse workers all of a sudden.

It's weird, you'd think they want to support 'blue collar' workers, like warehouse workers...

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

#170
post #29

I'm fairly certain these are satire and not actually affiliated with Amazon at all. Just the bio alone seems to give it away: https://twitter.com/fc_ambassador/with_replies Maybe only this one is satire? Hard to tell which level of galaxy brain this is.

They've updated the article and Amazon has acknowledged these employees are getting paid for this.
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