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Amazon workers face 'increased risk of mental illness'

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Amazon workers face 'increased risk of mental illness'

#31

Post by csmuk »

arethuza wrote: post #29
csmuk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree: 1. The business should foot the wage. 2. The wage should be fair. Doing something isn't actually necessarily possible. We've automated a big chunk of people's jobs away. There isn't necessarily a place for everyone to work now. Not only that, we're living longer. Provisions need to be made for these facts.

You could argue as the loaded cost of employing anyone is a good bit more than their salary that any employer is making a contribution. (Usual rule of thumb is ~50% of salary for fully loaded costs - and that's without any thing fancy).

I'm a business owner and have owned several businesses. I have employed over the years ~50 people.

Your point is total bollocks. Sorry for the language but that's the sort of detached non-holistic thinking that allows slavery to exist.

They like being whipped. After all what would they do if we weren't whipping them?

It's simply exploitation although capitalism has worked out how to call it training and internship to shrug off the social and moral responsibility.

Not only that, who pays the NI and employee tax contributions? Oh wait, that gets sucked from everyone else's income tax.

Re: Amazon workers face 'increased risk of mental illness'

#32

Post by yummyfajitas »

csmuk wrote: post #26
yummyfajitas wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is happening a lot in the UK a the moment as the Job Centre has been pushing for people to do this by threatening to cut their benefits if they don't do it. The result is people being forced to work for no compensation and having to pay for travel expenses out of their own (literally destitute) pocket. From the perspective of the employee/trainee, the only difference I see between this situation and actual emplo…

That's the sort of ignorance that is promoted. The big deal is that JSA which is the only paid amount is £56.80 a week. For a 40 hour standard week that is £1.42 an hour. The national minimum wage is £6.31 an hour. Not only that, the jobs in question can be literally 20-30 miles from your residential address so travelling is not even possible. Also, we end up paying the JSA for the business. The business sees this as…

That number isn't right at all. I just pretended to be a single unemployed female with one child, and they said I was entitled to this:

Jobseeker's Allowance (Income based) £71.70 per week

Child Tax Credit £62.72 per week

Housing Benefit £115.39 per week

Child Benefit £20.30 per week

Total weekly income £270.11 per week

(This excludes the below market rent, $500gbp/month, I claimed to be paying for council housing.)

https://www.dwpe-services.direct.gov.uk/portal/page/portal/b...

That works out to 6.75GBP/hour.

As for the incentives on the business side, I agree with you. Rather than being private sector jobs, these should be low skill government jobs. We can even help the budget by replacing overpaid unionized govt workers with job seekers working for their benefits. But it's dishonest to claim that they are paid only 50GBP/week for their labor.

[edit: I took out the child, benefits were 187 GBP/week, ignoring council housing subsidies.]

Re: Amazon workers face 'increased risk of mental illness'

#33

Post by Nursie »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #32
csmuk wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the sort of ignorance that is promoted. The big deal is that JSA which is the only paid amount is £56.80 a week. For a 40 hour standard week that is £1.42 an hour. The national minimum wage is £6.31 an hour. Not only that, the jobs in question can be literally 20-30 miles from your residential address so travelling is not even possible. Also, we end up paying the JSA for the business. The business sees this as…

That number isn't right at all. I just pretended to be a single unemployed female with one child, and they said I was entitled to this: Jobseeker's Allowance (Income based) £71.70 per week Child Tax Credit £62.72 per week Housing Benefit £115.39 per week Child Benefit £20.30 per week Total weekly income £270.11 per week (This excludes the below market rent, $500gbp/month, I claimed to be paying for council housing.)…

>> That number isn't right at all. I just pretended to be a single unemployed female with one child, and they said I was entitled to this:

If you're childless and (for instance) living with family then it would be accurate. Adding child allowances into the picture is pretty much beside the point here.

Re: Amazon workers face 'increased risk of mental illness'

#34

Post by goldenkey »

camus2 wrote: post #21
radical_blogger wrote: post #11

at least the british press still cares enough about the average british worker to write an article like this. The american press would only write an article like this if such conditions disparately impacted minority race workers. Pretty soon the british press will do the same. It just gets worse and worse. I see no light at the end of the tunnel. The citizens of america do not even ask the right questions.

Low Wage workers need to fight for their rights and working conditions. Nobody is going to do that for them. That's class warfare, and it has never been more important than today.

Not true. The fact of the matter is, low wage jobs usually require less skill , and therefore less education. It is part of our responsibility as those who are better off, to help fight for the rights of not just ourselves, but _all_ laborers

Re: Amazon workers face 'increased risk of mental illness'

#35

Post by [deleted] »

Nursie wrote: post #33
yummyfajitas wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That number isn't right at all. I just pretended to be a single unemployed female with one child, and they said I was entitled to this: Jobseeker's Allowance (Income based) £71.70 per week Child Tax Credit £62.72 per week Housing Benefit £115.39 per week Child Benefit £20.30 per week Total weekly income £270.11 per week (This excludes the below market rent, $500gbp/month, I claimed to be paying for council housing.)…

>> That number isn't right at all. I just pretended to be a single unemployed female with one child, and they said I was entitled to this: If you're childless and (for instance) living with family then it would be accurate. Adding child allowances into the picture is pretty much beside the point here.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon workers face 'increased risk of mental illness'

#36

Post by csmuk »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #32
csmuk wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the sort of ignorance that is promoted. The big deal is that JSA which is the only paid amount is £56.80 a week. For a 40 hour standard week that is £1.42 an hour. The national minimum wage is £6.31 an hour. Not only that, the jobs in question can be literally 20-30 miles from your residential address so travelling is not even possible. Also, we end up paying the JSA for the business. The business sees this as…

That number isn't right at all. I just pretended to be a single unemployed female with one child, and they said I was entitled to this: Jobseeker's Allowance (Income based) £71.70 per week Child Tax Credit £62.72 per week Housing Benefit £115.39 per week Child Benefit £20.30 per week Total weekly income £270.11 per week (This excludes the below market rent, $500gbp/month, I claimed to be paying for council housing.)…

It doesn't work like that. As someone who has been unemployed you have to deal with the following:

1. Child tax credit works on your previous year's income so it can take up to a year to get adjusted. Same with child benefit.

2. Housing benefit takes 8-12 weeks to come through. Not only that it won't cover most private rents inside the M25. The council waiting list is 3-5 years in London so you'll have to go into arrears. The only way out is to stop paying your rent and go the council and tell them you are homeless. At which point either you or your children are split up or you get wedged in what I can only describe as a "crackhead den" at best. My other half had to clean the needles away before she could wash in the morning when this happened to her (after she was made redundant and the market was suddenly saturated with her speciality).

3. You don't get JSA immediately. It takes 4-8 weeks for it to start.

You don't just clap your hands when you're unemployed and cash starts rolling in. There are other concerns.

It's a fucking rough ride and not only that you have to do the legwork and deal with government incompetence and prejudice along the way which is more than rife.

Re: Amazon workers face 'increased risk of mental illness'

#37

Post by arethuza »

csmuk wrote: post #31
arethuza wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could argue as the loaded cost of employing anyone is a good bit more than their salary that any employer is making a contribution. (Usual rule of thumb is ~50% of salary for fully loaded costs - and that's without any thing fancy).

I'm a business owner and have owned several businesses. I have employed over the years ~50 people. Your point is total bollocks. Sorry for the language but that's the sort of detached non-holistic thinking that allows slavery to exist. They like being whipped. After all what would they do if we weren't whipping them? It's simply exploitation although capitalism has worked out how to call it training and internship to…

Leaving aside the point about making folks pay their own traveling costs, which I agree is unfair, what would you do with these people?

[And for record I have started a company that employed a few hundred and (long) before that had been unemployed for a while and had a few rather grim laboring jobs].

Re: Amazon workers face 'increased risk of mental illness'

#38

Post by hershel »

tluyben2 wrote: post #3

I worked as a picker for a few days in a large distribution facility in my home town when I was in high school; this was over 20 years ago. They had rails everywhere through the complex which seemed to do nothing; when I asked what that was, they explained that they, together with the biggest IT company in NL, made software and robots to do our work automatically. It would be put in production the next year. It hasn'…

Amazon recently purchased a company that builds warehouse robots(kiva robotics) for a quarter billion dollar. This company had sold systems for some reasonably large warehouses.

Those are pretty good signs that robots in the warehouse are about to happen in a mass scale.

Also ,there are rumors that amazon is building large amounts of robots , and will launch a service in 2015 based on those(just rumors).

And to the question why does it take so long? for many expensive technologies, 20 years from talking to industry acceptance is normal.It takes time to improve the technology in reliability , cost, performance , convince industry to use it and scale it.

Re: Amazon workers face 'increased risk of mental illness'

#39

Post by nicpottier »

"Desk jockey does manual labor and his feet hurt, story at 11"

I worked the graveyard shift as a picker at Amazon back around '00. Back then Amazon was so nervous about anybody introducing a bug in the site that all software engineers were put to work either at warehouses or as customer service agents during the holidays. I worked customer service one year and picked for two years, both times during graveyard shifts. This involved flying out to the middle of nowhere from the Seattle headquarters and living out of a hotel.

Honestly, it was a lot of fun. Seeing those parts of the operation was fascinating, and Amazon encouraged you to look for inefficiencies and offer solutions or think about how you could fix things once you got back behind a keyboard.

Our shifts were exactly the same as the full time workers, but they were faster than us, especially at first. Your feet do indeed hurt and you do indeed walk a ton, but that is more because you've been sitting on your ass for 12 hours a day instead of actually using your body.

Yes, you are a mechanical turk in the strictest sense of the word, being dispatched by your hand scanner to go find something and put it in a cart, but it isn't hard work, just a bit boring. If you take it seriously and get good at troubleshooting shortages, then you start getting to do things that require a bit more problem solving, but even the really menial stations aren't terribly bad.

In short, this is just a bunch of whining that manual labor is hard work and not terribly engaging. The conditions themselves are plenty good, hard to imagine them being better while doing the same job.

They are nothing, nothing at all like the conditions any number of people work every day to manufacture your shoes, t-shirts and electronic equipment. You get to move around, you aren't on an assembly line, the work is varied in its environment.

So shut your trap and get back to picking, there's product to get out to customers.

Re: Amazon workers face 'increased risk of mental illness'

#40

Post by csmuk »

arethuza wrote: post #37
csmuk wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a business owner and have owned several businesses. I have employed over the years ~50 people. Your point is total bollocks. Sorry for the language but that's the sort of detached non-holistic thinking that allows slavery to exist. They like being whipped. After all what would they do if we weren't whipping them? It's simply exploitation although capitalism has worked out how to call it training and internship to…

Leaving aside the point about making folks pay their own traveling costs, which I agree is unfair, what would you do with these people? [And for record I have started a company that employed a few hundred and (long) before that had been unemployed for a while and had a few rather grim laboring jobs].

Good for you. That's what we need. Been in the same situation.

That's easy as I've already done it before on several occasions.

I'd employ them for the minimum wage and pay up their travel allowance (be that oyster or season ticket). If they have any needs such as caring for relatives, which appears to be the main reason people are unemployed from what I have seen, I'd make sure their time and work location was flexible. I'd then make damn sure that:

a) they get some training and the ability to self improve.

b) they get a secure job.

People are grateful of both of these. If you make a positive contribution to their lives, they will make a contribution to your business. Everyone benefits.

The problem is that the prevailing opinion is that exploitation and bottom line are the most important things. While sipping champers at the wine bar, your slaves are turning the wheels for you. No thanks.

For ref, all of my business were fully reinvestment based. No profit was made, no investors were used and good, reliable salaries were paid. They weren't sold off for profit - they were given to the employees when I started venture+1 up. That was it.

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