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Brutal life working in Amazon warehouse

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Re: Brutal life working in Amazon warehouse

#41

Post by JoeDaDude »

jrs95 wrote: post #5
atonse wrote: post #2

Is it just me or is Amazon turning out to be even more evil than Walmart ever was? It's just cuz they're an "innovative" tech company, that we let them get away with it?

Were they ever very innovative? Their initial success was pretty much based on having a bunch of investment capital and using it to kill their competition and grab market share without making profits for many years. Is it really very difficult to become an 'innovative' giant corporation when you've captured a huge part of the market like that?

They did "invent" and patent [1] the 1-click buying button. The patent has expired, however, they also had a trademark on the phrase "1-Click".

{1] https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC...

Re: Brutal life working in Amazon warehouse

#42

Post by token_throwaway »

This job sounds shitty but have you ever spoken to someone in a domestic role? A postal employee? A trucker? A janitor at your office building? Kitchen staff at a restaurant who do not even have time to take a piss without dropping the ball, let alone timed pee breaks? Lots of jobs are hard. Extremely hard. And often, jobs that are very very hard pay hardly anything. There is a two-way transaction happening here, though - you pick a job that you are qualified for, and you work at it in exchange for money. And if it's not worth the money to you, you find a different job that you're qualified for. As long as people are willing to do this job for this amount of money, it will probably not get better unfortunately. And as companies get bigger, they always morally regress to the mean. Instead of going after companies (playing whack-a-mole), I think empowering people to learn employable skills is a better investment.

Also I'm going to remember the fuss about Amazon when their warehouses are 100% robotic, and everyone is mad that it's not creating enough jobs.

Re: Brutal life working in Amazon warehouse

#43

Post by michaelbuckbee »

Setting aside how needlessly brutal some of this seems - these jobs aren't going to be around for long.

Amazon's really working hard on automating them away as well - the specific picking job described in the article is part of their well know Amazon Robotics Challenge:

https://www.amazonrobotics.com/#/roboticschallenge

Re: Brutal life working in Amazon warehouse

#45

Post by Asooka »

user5994461 wrote: post #27
Asooka wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why can Costco afford to treat their employees humanely?

Costco doesn't deliver millions of package a day for free to the door of their customers, does it?

Maybe Amazon should retire the one-click same-day offer as well, if it requires this level of human misery to fulfil. Personally I've never received a package in less than two weeks and I still shop at Amazon since they have the best availability and prices.

Re: Brutal life working in Amazon warehouse

#47

Post by Asooka »

token_throwaway wrote: post #42

This job sounds shitty but have you ever spoken to someone in a domestic role? A postal employee? A trucker? A janitor at your office building? Kitchen staff at a restaurant who do not even have time to take a piss without dropping the ball, let alone timed pee breaks? Lots of jobs are hard. Extremely hard. And often, jobs that are very very hard pay hardly anything. There is a two-way transaction happening here, tho…

It's not about being willing, people literally have no choice. It's either starve and be homeless or work this really shitty job. We should regulate the industry so our economy doesn't have to run on brutal human misery. If that means Amazon can't deliver your package in 8 hours, but rather in 2 days, then so be it. Human life comes before profits.

Re: Brutal life working in Amazon warehouse

#48

Post by zemo »

token_throwaway wrote: post #42

This job sounds shitty but have you ever spoken to someone in a domestic role? A postal employee? A trucker? A janitor at your office building? Kitchen staff at a restaurant who do not even have time to take a piss without dropping the ball, let alone timed pee breaks? Lots of jobs are hard. Extremely hard. And often, jobs that are very very hard pay hardly anything. There is a two-way transaction happening here, tho…

this is extremely, extremely tone-deaf.

> As long as people are willing to do this job for this amount of money, it will probably not get better unfortunately.

child labor didn't stop because parents stopped being willing to sentence their kids to labor, it stopped because of laws. The free market does nothing to guarantee that working conditions are livable or humane. Any suggestion to the contrary is at best naive, at worst malicious.

> I think empowering people to learn employable skills is a better investment.

That's nice, but where does a single parent working wage labor have the time to learn new skills? Who is paying a livable wage for people to learn new skills?

Re: Brutal life working in Amazon warehouse

#49

Post by fpisfun »

When an Amazon warehouse opened in my area relatively recently it seemed that many people were scrambling like crazy to try to get a job there. These seemed to be people who are poorly educated and low skilled but clearly the Amazon job represented a step up for them. I'm not saying that there aren't issues but clearly working for Amazon is still a better alternative than their other options. I personally know of someone who was basically skipping out on child support payments before starting work at Amazon and now is making the payments.

Re: Brutal life working in Amazon warehouse

#50

Post by bpicolo »

user5994461 wrote: post #27
Asooka wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why can Costco afford to treat their employees humanely?

Costco doesn't deliver millions of package a day for free to the door of their customers, does it?

> for free

Except for the part where you pay for it.

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